My Father's Wives

by José Eduardo Agualusa

Translated from the original Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

Upon his death, the famous Angolan composer Faustino Manso left seven widows and eighteen children. His youngest daughter, Laurentina, a filmmaker, tries to reconstruct the late musician’s turbulent life.

In My Father’s Wives, reality and fiction run side by side, the former feeding into the latter. However, in the territories José Eduardo Agualusa crosses, fiction plays a part in reality too. The four characters in the novel which the author is writing as he travels accompany him from Luanda, the Angolan capital to Benguela and Namibe. They cross the Namibian sands and their ghost towns, reaching Cape Town. They carry on to Maputo, then Quelimane beside the Bon Sinais River, and thence to the island of Mozambique. They cross landscapes that border dreams, landscapes from which – here and there – the strangest characters emerge. My Father’s Wives is a novel about women, music and magic. These pages herald the rebirth of Africa, a continent afflicted by terrible problems but blessed with a talent for music, by the ever-renewed strength of its women and the secret power of ancient gods.

José Eduardo Agualusa was born in Huambo in 1960 and is one of the leading young literary voices from Angola, and from Portuguese language today. His first book, The Conspiracy, a historical novel set in São Paulo de Luanda between 1880 and 1911, paints a fascinating portrait of a society marked by opposites, in which only those who can adapt have any chance of success. Creole, which has evoked comparisons with Bruce Chatwin's The Viceroy of Ouidah, was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, while The Book of Chameleons won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2007. Agualusa divides his time between Angola, Brazil and Portugal.