MIA COUTO,Author of The Tuner of Silences,WINNER of the $50,000 Neustadt Prize"A RADIO FRANCE-CULTURE/TÉLÉRAMA BEST WORK OF FICTIONBY THE WINNER OF THE 2013 CAMÕES PRIZE"Quite unlike anything else I have read from Africa."- Doris Lessing "By meshing the richness of African beliefs . . . into the Western framework of the novel, he creates a mysterious and surreal epic."- Henning Mankell Mwanito was eleven when he saw a woman for the first time, and the sight so surprised him he burst into tears. Mwanito has been living in a former big-game park for eight years. The only people he knows are his father, his brother, an uncle, and a servant. He's been told that the rest of the world is dead, that all roads are sad, that they wait for an apology from God. In the place his father calls Jezoosalem, Mwanito has been told that crying and praying are the same thing. Both, it seems, are forbidden.The eighth novel by the internationally bestselling Mia Couto, 'The Tuner of Silences' is the story of Mwanito's struggle to reconstruct a family history that his father is unable to discuss. With the young woman's arrival in Jezoosalem, however, the silence of the past quickly breaks down, and both his father's story and the world are heard once more. 'The Tuner of Silences' has been published to acclaim in more than half a dozen countries. Now in its first English translation, this story of an African boy's quest for the truth endures as a magical, humanizing confrontation between one child and the legacy of war.PRAISE FOR MIA COUTO"On almost every page... we sense Couto's delight in those places where language slips officialdom's asphyxiating grasp." - ' The New York Times' "Even in translation, his prose is suffused with striking images." - ' The Washington Post' "Mia Couto, long regarded as one of the leading writers in Mozambique, has now been recognized as one of the greatest living writers in the Portuguese language...The Tuner of Silences&nbspcracks open a welcoming window onto a vast world of literary pleasures that has for too long remained under the radar in the English-speaking world." - Philip Graham,&nbspThe Millions PRAISE FOR DAVID BROOKSHAW "David Brookshaw dexterously renders the novel's often colloquial, pithy Portuguese into lively English. Brookshaw's task is made more exacting by the particular quality of Couto's brilliance." - ' The New York Times' "David Brookshaw's lyrical translation of Mia Couto's Portuguese lull[s] us into a hypnotized semi-acceptance of [an] impossible universe...Couto's narrative tone, at once deadpan and beguiling, and his virtuoso management of time, place him alongside the best Latin American magic realists." - Times Literary Supplement

Mia Couto's profile page

David Brookshaw's profile page

Mia Couto an environmental biologist from Mozambique, is the author of 25 books of fiction, essays and poems in his native Portuguese. Couto's novels and short story collections have been translated into 20 languages. Two of his novels have been made into feature films. His work has been awarded important literary prizes in Mozambique, South Africa, Portugal, Italy and Brazil. His books have been bestsellers in Africa, Europe and Latin America. Six of Couto's books have been translated into English in the United Kingdom: two short story collections by Heinemann and four novels by Serpent's Tail.&nbspThe Tuner of Silences&nbspis his first novel to be published in North America.&nbspDavid Brookshaw is a professor of Hispanic, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol (London), and the General Editor of the HiPLA Monograph Series. He is the translator of six books by Couto, including Sleepwalking Land and The Last Flight of the Flamingo.

"Mia Couto's own name is not well known in North America, but it should be, because he is a powerful storyteller in any language...[he] captivates the reader's attention." - Winnipeg ReviewCouto is the author of six novels, six short story collections, and numerous other books, which have been published in more than twenty countries. His fable-like short stories, rooted in animist culture and an irreverent disregard for the conventions of formal literary Portuguese, celebrate African oral storytelling... Such white writers as Nadine Gordimer or J. M. Coetzee in neighbouring South Africa remain more observers than participants in the African culture that surrounds them, but Couto's work, drenched in traditional African conceptions of time, ancestry, and belonging to the land, is widely read in Mozambique, and seen as representative of the country's hybridized African culture.- The Walrus"Lovers of African literature may find resonance here between Couto's writing and J.M. Coetzee's new novel, The Childhood of Jesus. Both turn away from the present to reflect on the ethics of our interactions with others and the parameters of our internal worlds. While Couto's work is ultimately more joyful, The Tuner of Silences remains a sad novel of poetic brilliance-haunting in its human landscape." - The Independent "Mia Couto, long regarded as one of the leading writers in Mozambique, has now been recognized as one of the greatest living writers in the Portuguese language... 'The Tuner of Silences' cracks open a welcoming window onto a vast world of literary pleasures that has for too long remained under the radar in the Englishspeaking world." - Philip Graham, The Millions "a fine portrait of grief and loss...and a strange fever-dream that jolts in and out of fantasy." - The Globe and Mail "Couto's powerful, haunting, kaleidoscopic mythopoesis dramatizes the grievous, crumbling, post-nuclear family, forever on the run from its inevitable breakdown, with nowhere to go in a barbed-wire world where beauty provokes violence...a chthonic pietà carved from gnarled, screaming, ironwood stumps." - Review of Contemporary Literature "If I said Couto's language was like poetry, you might misunderstand...Instead the language in this book is like looking into a crystal clear lake and being able to see every detail of the fish, vegetation, and geology while at the same time seeing your reflection and that of the sky and the trees behind you...I loved this book and I will read it again." - Geography of Reading The language is as always peppered with Couto's trademark aphorisms and inventive similes ... a remarkable text." - SLiP "David Brookshaw's lyrical translation of Mia Couto's Portuguese lull[s] us into a hypnotized semi-acceptance of [an] impossible universe...Couto's narrative tone, at once deadpan and beguiling, and his virtuoso management of time, place him alongside the best Latin American magic realists." - Times Literary SupplementMia Couto is trying to lift the yoke of colonialism from a culture by reinvigorating its language. A master of Portuguese prose, he wants to lift that burden one word, one sentence, and one narrative at a time, and in this endeavor he has few if any peers." - Robert Con Davis-Undiano, Executive Director, World Literature Today Some critics have called Mia Couto 'the smuggler writer,' a sort of Robin Hood of words who steals meanings to make them available in every tongue, forcing apparently separate worlds to communicate. Within his novels, each line is like a small poem." - Gabriella Ghermandi"Subtle and elegant." - Wall Street Journal