"One of the greatest living writers in the Portuguese language."?Philip Graham, The Millions

"Subtle and elegant."?The Wall Street Journal

"At once deadpan and beguiling."?Times Literary Supplement

"To understand what makes António 'Mia' Emílio Leite Couto special?even extraordinary?we have to loosen our grip on the binary that distinguishes between 'the West' and 'Africa.' Couto is 'white' without not being African, and as an 'African' writer he's one of the most important figures in a global Lusophone literature that stretches across three continents."?The New Inquiry

What would Barack Obama's 2004 campaign have looked like if it unfolded in an African nation? What does it mean to be an African writer today? How do writers and poets from all continents teach us to cross the sertão, the savannah, the barren places where we're forced to walk within ourselves? Bringing together the best pieces from his previously untranslated nonfiction collections, alongside new material presented here for the first time in any language, Pensativities offers English readers a taste of Mia Couto as essayist, lecturer, and journalist?with essays on cosmopolitanism, poverty, culture gaps, conservation, and more.

Mia Couto, an environmental biologist from Mozambique, is the author of twenty five books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His work has been translated into twenty languages worldwide. In 2007 he was the first African author to win the Latin Union Award for Romance Languages, in 2013 he was awarded the €100,000 Camões Prize for Literature, and in 2014 he received World Literature Today's $50,000 Neustadt Prize for Literature.

"Quite unlike anything else I have read from Africa."—Doris Lessing

"By meshing the richness of African beliefs . . . into the Western framework of the novel, he creates a mysterious and surreal epic."—Henning Mankell

Mwanito Vitalício was eleven when he saw a woman for the first time, and the sight so surprised him he burst into tears.

Mwanito's been living in a big-game park for eight years. The only people he knows are his father, his brother, an uncle, and a servant. He's been told that the rest of the world is dead, that all roads are sad, that they wait for an apology from God. In the place his father calls Jezoosalem, Mwanito has been told that crying and praying are the same thing. Both, it seems, are forbidden.

The eighth novel by The New York Times-acclaimed Mia Couto, The Tuner of Silences is the story of Mwanito's struggle to reconstruct a family history that his father is unable to discuss. With the young woman's arrival in Jezoosalem, however, the silence of the past quickly breaks down, and both his father's story and the world are heard once more.

The Tuner of Silences was heralded as one of the most important books to be published in France in 2011 and remains a shocking portrait of the intergenerational legacies of war. Now available for the first time in English.

Mia Couto is the author of twenty-five books. Translated into twenty languages, his novels have been bestsellers in Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

“An original and fresh tale, quite unlike anything else I have read from Africa. I enjoyed it very much.”—Doris Lessing

“A peculiarily African sensibility . . . a writer of fluid, fragmentary narratives. . . . Remarkable.”—New Statesman

A police inspector is investigating a strange murder—a case in which all the suspects are eager to claim responsibility for the act.

Set in a former Portuguese slave fort, Under the Frangipani combines fable and allegory, dreams and myths with an earthy humor. Part thriller, part an exploration of language itself, Mia Couto’s novel surprises and delights.

Mia Couto works as an agronomist in Maputo, Mozambique.

“On almost every page of this witty magical realist whodunit, we sense Couto's delight on those places where language slips officialdom's asphyxiating grasp.”—The New York Times Book Review on The Last Flight of the Flamingo

“The most prominent of the younger generation of writers in Portuguese-speaking Africa, Couto passionately and sensitively describes everyday life in poverty-stricken Mozambique.”—Guardian (London)

“Quite unlike anything else I have read from Africa.”—Doris Lessing

As the civil war rages in 1980s Mozambique, an old man and a young boy, refugees from the war, seek shelter in a burnt-out bus. Among the effects of a dead passenger, they come across a set of notebooks that tell of his life. As the boy reads the story to his elderly companion, this story and their own develop in tandem. Written in 1992, Mia Couto's first novel is a powerful indictment of the suffering war brings.

Born in 1955 in Mozambique, Mia Couto ran the AIM news agency during the revolutionary struggle. He now lives in Maputo where he works as an environmental biologist and heads the Mozambique side of the Limpopo Transnational Park.

“A wonderful mix of magical realism and wordplay that has a similar tone to Márquez at his best. Couto writes in an idiom all his own that feels authentically African.”—Ink

In Mozambique after the end of the civil war, local soldiers have been unaccountably blown up. When it begins to happen to UN peacekeepers, a high-level delegation visits the village of Tizangara to initiate an investigation. As the UN investigation unfolds, Mia Couto brilliantly shows how the perceptions of events both inside and outside the country are altered when interpreted from an African perspective.

Mia Couto was born in 1955 in Mozambique and is the most prominent Portuguese-speaking African writer. He now lives in Maputo, where he manages the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park.