The Cartographer of Absences

A haunting novel about a father and son in the waning days of colonial Mozambique by the winner of the 2025 PEN/Nabokov Award Diogo Santiago is a celebrated Mozambican poet and intellectual, a well-known professor at the university in his country’s capital. In 2019, on the eve of a cyclone that will devastate the East African coast, he returns to his hometown of Beira to receive a tribute from his fellow citizens. As he travels across Mozambique, his mind returns to the past—to his own upbringin