Sea Loves Me

“Couto employs his haunting lyricism … to examine the burdens of race, history, & culture in the aftermath of Mozambique’s 1974 independence from Portugal … Mia Couto’s multivalent vision also manifests in the seamless merging of author & translators, original & translated texts … Like Mia Couto’s aesthetic effort to render whole the many facets of his contradictory identity, the translators’ linguistic dance simultaneously pays homage to his original fiction, & gives birth to its autonomous & indelible existence in English.” — Asymptote

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New & selected fiction, over half in English for the first time, from the winner of the 2014 Neustadt Prize.

Known internationally for his novels, Neustadt Prize-winner Mia Couto first became famous for his short stories. Sea Loves Me includes sixty-four of his best, thirty-six of which appear in English for the first time. Covering the entire arc of Couto's career, this collection displays the Mozambican author's inventiveness, sensitivity, & social range with greater richness than any previous collection—from early stories that reflect the harshness of life under Portuguese colonialism; to magical tales of rural Africa; to contemporary fables of the fluidity of race ' gender, environmental disaster, & the clash between the countryside & the city. The title novella, long acclaimed as one of Couto's best works but never before available in English, caps this collection with the lyrical story of a search for a lost father that leads unexpectedly to love.

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Mia Couto was born in Beira, Mozambique, in 1955. He is the author of more than 25 books of fiction, essays, & poems. His novels & short story collections have been adapted into feature films. 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.