The Drinker of Horizons: A Novel
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The scintillating conclusion to the critically acclaimed historical saga: the Jan Michalski Prize–winning Sands of the Emperor trilogy.
“[Couto’s] life has been woven into the history of the nation, and he has become the foremost chronicler of Mozambique’s antiheroes: its women, its peasants, even its dead.” —Jacob Judah, The New York Times
In The Drinker of Horizons, the award-winning author Mia Couto brings the epic love story between a young Mozambican woman named Imani and the Portuguese sergeant Germano de Melo to its moving close. We resume where The Sword and the Spear concluded: While Germano is left behind in Africa, serving with the Portuguese military, Imani has been enlisted to act as the interpreter to the imprisoned emperor of Gaza, Ngungunyane, on the long voyage to Lisbon. For the emperor and his seven wives, it will be a journey of no return. Imani’s own return will come only after a decade-long odyssey through the Portuguese empire at the beginning of the twentieth century.
If history is always narrated by the victors, in The Drinker of Horizons, Couto performs an act of restorative justice, giving a voice to those silenced by the horrors of colonialism. Throughout, Couto’s language astonishes, rendering with utter clarity the beauty and terror of war and love, and revealing the devastation of a profoundly unequal encounter between cultures.
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Mia Couto, born in Mozambique in 1955, is among the most prominent Portuguese-language writers working today. After studying medicine and biology, he worked as a journalist and headed several national newspapers and magazines in Mozambique. Couto has been awarded the Camões Prize for Literature and the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, among other awards. He was also short-listed for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. He lives in Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as a biologist.
David Brookshaw is an emeritus professor at the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. He has translated several other books by Mia Couto, including Woman of the Ashes, Confession of the Lioness, The Tuner of Silences, A River Called Time, and Sleepwalking Land.
