Lídia Jorge

"The setting of this novel is an old farmhouse in Portugal - a house far enough from the Atlantic not to hear the breaking waves during a storm but near enough for the walls to be corroded by the salt in the air.". "With most members of her large family having left the hardship of life in this landscape of sand and stone for jobs in faraway places, a young woman struggles to piece together her past from the widely varying stories she is told. Left behind by a free-spirited, feckless father, a seducer with a rare gift for drawing, she is raised by her uncle who has married her mother. The only memories of her father's two brief visits are the echoes of his footsteps on the stairs leading to her room. The only signs of him are letters from the widest reaches of the world - letters accompanied by brilliantly colored drawings of exotic birds. The daughter longs for her father and, as she grows up, she is determined to find him and uncover the truth."--BOOK JACKET.

This captivating tale is told in two parts. The first presents Lidia Jorge's version of a traditional story about a series of supposed incidents set in Beira, Mozambique. The events take place in the final years of Portugal's colonial African wars as an undisclosed narrator describes the military wedding of a young Portuguese ensign and an equally young bride. The wedding is followed by the mass poisoning of hundreds of native Africans and the arrival of a rain of locusts. The story ends grimly with the groom's suicide. Evita Lopo, the unnamed bride from the first part, narrates the remainder of the story. Twenty years have gone by and she reviews the past and questions the unidentified narrator's rendering of events in the first section. Evita's reminiscences destroy the credibility of the earlier story, and she supplies the reader with a great deal of information that the author of the previous account had suppressed or to which he or she merely alluded. It becomes apparent that betrayal and guilt have motivated all of the characters' actions.

Au Mozambique, sur la terrasse d'un grand hôtel au bord de l'océan Indien, les invités d'une noce sont surpris par une invasion de sauterelles...