José Eduardo Agualusa

Daniel has been living with the artist Moira for three years now, on her native Island of Mozambique. They are awaiting the birth of their child, and at the same time organising the island's first literary festival. But as soon as the first festival guests arrive, the coast is hit by a cyclone. The island is spared, but the mainland sinks under rain and mud. The bridge to the mainland becomes impassable, and telephone and internet connections are down. The islanders, and with them the writers who have been invited to the festival, are cut off from the outside world and left to their own devices. The authors talk, eat and drink, get closer to each other, hear ghostly voices and meet characters from their own books. Some believe themselves to be in an intermediate realm, a kind of limbo, and some begin to write. The boundaries between reality and fiction, between past and future, between life and death become blurred. After five days everything goes back to normal, but the world is now a different place. Where do we go when it's all over? Perhaps to a small island. This is a novel about the nature of life and of time, and the extraordinary power of imagination and the written word, capable of creating anything and regenerating everything. Translated from the Portguese by Daniel Hahn