Rain: And Other Stories, Paperback

After the war, I thought all that was left was ashes, hollow ruins . . . Today, I know that's not true. Where man remains, a seed, too, survives, a dream to inseminate time.

Published in the aftermath of Mozambique's bloody civil war, Mia Couto's third collection seeks out the places violence could not reach, the places where, the author writes, "every man is the same: pretending he's here, dreaming of going away, and plotting his return." Shifting masterfully between forms--creation tale to meditation, playful comedy to magical twist--these stories grapple with questions of what's been lost and what can be reclaimed, what future exists for a country that broke the yoke of colonialism only to descend into internecine war, what is Mozambican and what is Mozambique. Following fishermen and fortune-tellers, widows and drunks, and one errant hippopotamus, this new translation of stories by the Man Booker-listed author of Confession of the Lioness rediscovers possibility and what it means to be reborn.

Mia Couto was born in Beira, Mozambique, in 1955. He dropped out of medical school to join the struggle against Portuguese colonialism in his country. When Mozambique became independent in 1975, Couto was named Director of Information in the revolutionary government and served as editor of two newspapers. In the 1980s, he returned to university to study environmental biology while beginning his writing career. Couto is the author of more than 25 books of fiction, essays and poems. His novels and short story collections have been published in 20 languages; made into feature films; been bestsellers in Africa, Europe, and South America; and awarded major literary prizes in Mozambique, Portugal, Brazil, and Italy, including the 2013 Camőes Prize, and the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2015, he was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. His novel The Tuner of Silences was longlisted for the 2015 IMPAC Dublin Award, while Confession of the Lioness was shortlisted for the Award in 2017. Mia Couto lives with his family in Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as an environmental consultant and a theatre director.