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.
