José Luandino Vieira

As João Vêncio, mulatto hustler, awaits sentence in an Angolan jail for attempted murder, he recounts the loves and friendships of his life. There is Maristrela, the night-black wife of a white-trash doctor, who teaches him how to make the whydah birds sing more sweetly. Sissy, the boy with long blond curls, who shares with him the sensuousness of the ocean; and his sweetheart, his mocha-chocolate Bailundo girl, who brings him Moamba stew from the Benguela-Catumbela lands even though he tried to strangle her. A book breathtaking in both its violence and its tenderness.