While swimming in the clear blue waters of the Rainbow Hotel, Daniel Benchimol finds a waterproof camera, floating seemingly lost in the sea. He goes on to discover that the camera belongs to Moira, a Mozambican artist famous for a series of photos depicting her own dreams. On seeing the images, Daniel realises that Moira is also the mysterious woman whom he has been dreaming about repeatedly. The two meet, and Daniel becomes involved in a unusual dream experiment with a Brazilian neuroscientist, who's working with Moira on a machine to film and photograph people’s dreams.

Meanwhile, Daniel’s daughter Karinguiri, one of Angola’s young dreamers, is arrested along with six friends for staging a protest during a presidential press conference in Luanda. The group go on hunger strike, attracting worldwide press attention, showing the power of young people when they raise their voices against the regime.

The Society of Reluctant Dreamers is a surreal, vivid novel about the slipperiness of truth and reality, art versus dictatorship, courage versus fear, change and the old order, amidst the politics of Angola's tumultuous past, present and future.

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2017 A finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 The brilliant new novel from the winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years. She lives off vegetables and pigeons, burns her furniture and books to stay alive and keeps herself busy by writing her story on the walls of her home. The outside world slowly seeps into Ludo's life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers and a note attached to a bird's foot. Until one day she meets Sabalu, a young boy from the street who climbs up to her terrace.

'Ingenious, consistently taut and witty' TLS 'Humorous and quizzical, with a light touch on weighty themes, the narrative darts about with lizard-like colour and velocity' Independent 'Strange, elliptical, charming' Guardian 'A poetic, beguiling meditation on truth and storytelling . . . from the dreamscapes of magical realism to a gripping political thriller and even a murder mystery' New Internationalist Félix Ventura trades in memories, a slippery character selling new pasts to people whose bright futures lack only a good lineage, and wiping clean the slate of their identity. In a narrative that darts between past and present Angola, a bookish albino man, a beautiful woman, a mysterious foreigner and a witty talking lizard come together to discover their real origins. For theirs is a world where the truth seems to shift from moment to moment and where history itself is up for grabs . . . WINNER OF THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE 'A work of fierce originality' Independent 'Without doubt one of the most important Portuguese-language writers of his generation' ANTÓNIO LOBO ANTUNES 'Cross J. M. Coetzee with Gabriel García Márquez and you've got José Eduardo Agualusa' ALAN KAUFMAN Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

In this depiction of the devastating history of a country tormented by 30 years of conflict, a journalist investigates the mysterious disappearance of Angolan poetess and historian Lidia do Carmo Ferreira, who vanished from Luanda as the civil war flared up with unprecedented ferocity when the rebel movement refused to accept defeat in the country's first democratic election. A fictive biography of Ferreira's life, this tangled mesh of fact and fiction uses the disillusionment of its two protagonists to re-create the disappointment of an entire nation in turmoil. A careful translation of one of the strongest writers in the Portuguese language today, this novel portrays the agony of a country's struggle for independence.

Felix Ventura trades in an unusual commodity; he is a dealer in memories, clandestinely selling new pasts to people whose futures are secure and who lack only a good lineage to complete their lives. In this completely original murder mystery, where people are not who they seem and the briefest of connections leads to the forging of entirely new histories, a bookish albino, a beautiful woman, a mysterious foreigner, and a witty talking lizard come together to discover the truth of their lives. Set in Angola, Agualusa's tale darts from tormented past to dream-filled present with a lightness that belies the savage history of a country in which many have something to forget -- and to hide.

A brilliant American debut by one of the most lauded writers in the Portuguese-speaking world, this is a beautifully written and always surprising tale of race, truth, and the transformative power of creativity.