The masterful conclusion to the critically acclaimed historical saga: the Jan Michalski Prize–winning Sands of the Emperor Trilogy.
In The Drinker of Horizons, the award-winning author Mia Couto brings the epic love story between the young African woman Imani and the Portuguese sergeant Germano de Melo to its stirring close. We resume where The Sword and the Spear left off: While Germano is left behind in Africa, serving with the Portuguese military, Imani has been enlisted to serve as the interpreter to the imprisoned emperor of Gaza, Ngungunyane, on the long voyage to Lisbon. For Ngungunyane and his seven wives, it will be a journey of no return. Imani’s will come only after a decade-long odyssey through the Portuguese empire at the turn of the nineteenth century.
If history is always narrated by the victors, in his Sands of the Emperor Trilogy, Couto performs an act of restorative justice, supplying a voice to those silenced by the horrors of colonialism. These novels achieve the miracle of personalizing history. Throughout, Couto’s language astonishes, rendering with utter clarity the beauty and terror of war and love, and revealing the devastation of a profoundly unequal clash of cultures.
Mia Couto, born in Mozambique in 1955, is one of the most prominent writers in Portuguese-speaking Africa. After studying medicine and biology, he worked as a journalist and headed several Mozambican national newspapers and magazines. Couto has been awarded the Camões Prize for Literature and the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, among other awards. He wa...