Mia Couto: A River Called Time

Geoff Wisner reviews Mia Couto's A River Called Time.

A River Called Time is the latest novel by Mozambican writer Mia Couto to be translated and published by the British press Serpent’s Tail.
Like other fiction by Couto, this one takes place in a dreamlike land that is and is not Mozambique. The tiny country in which the book is set consists of an island named Luar-do-Chão (Moonlight on the Ground) and a city on the mainland. Cashews are grown, most people speak Portuguese, and women wear a kind of Mozambican sarong called a capulana. The country has recently fought a guerrilla war: presumably a Marxist revolution, because the beret on one character’s old uniform bears a red star.

Click to read the full article