A General Theory of Oblivion

Playful & full of warm humour, José Eduardo Agualusa’s dazzling human drama explores the thrills, hopes & dangers of radical change. 

Translated by Daniel Hahn.

This wild patchwork of a novel tells the story of Angola through Ludo, a woman who bricks herself into her apartment on the eve of Angolan independence. For the next 30 years, she lives off vegetables and pigeons & burns her furniture to stay warm. But the outside world slowly seeps in through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers & a note attached to a bird’s foot. Then one day she meets Sabalu, a young boy who climbs up to her terrace.

"Interspersed with what sometimes feels like a fever dream of Ludo’s survival inside her castle walls are the swirling stories of the people and events in the streets and halls just outside. The tales may seem random and disconnected, but Agualusa is a master storyteller who doesn’t bother to introduce a character or mention an incident unless it has a larger role to play … It’s a tribute to Agualusa’s storytelling that the bittersweet redemption found by his characters feels authentic; he and they have earned it." — Jennifer Bort Yacovissi, The Washington Independent Review Of Books

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José Eduardo Agualusa was born in Huambo, Angola, in 1960.  He is one of the leading literary voices in Angola & the Portuguese-speaking world. His novel Creole was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, & The Book of Chameleons won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007.