New smaller edition. Set in contemporary Angola, The Book of Chameleons is populated with characters who stories never quite settle. It is some pages in before you realise that the narrator is a lizard, Living on Felix Ventura's living room wall. Felix trades in an usual commodity - he sells pasts. If you don't like yours, he can come up with an entirely new one for you, full of better memories and with a complete lineage. This is a book about the landscape of memory, its inconsistencies and its randomness. 180pp, UK. ARCADIA.

Smaller paperback edition. A novel told through letters of a Portuguese adventurer's journeys through the backwoods of Angola, across wild seas across to colonial Brazil and eventually back home. Margaret Drabble called it a 'an evocative, stylish work'. 153pp, UK. ARCADIA.

Based around Benguela in Angola, 'The Generation From Utopia' expresses the disillusionment that comes with the independence. In Portuguese. Gloss, 369pp, PORTUGAL. DOM QUIXOTE.

Debut novel, a story told by a political refugee living in South Africa. It investigates the life of one particular immigrant, Mpanda from Angola, and his experiences of trying to make the best of being an unemployed foreign national in South Africa. 256pp, SOUTH AFRICA. KWELA BOOKS.

The title of the novel is: 'Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent', but this character is no James Bond. Indeed, when Jaime Bunda is introduced it is his unusually large arse that the narrator sees fit to focus on. No wonder: his most prominent feature is a defining one. It is with his rear com-fortably on a chair that Jaime Bunda spends most of his time. A cousin who runs the SIG -- a central investigating service with police powers -- got him a job there, but it's basically an apprenticeship without any responsibilities or duties. And certainly no gun. 296pp, UK. AFLAME BOOKS.

A new edition of Pepetela's 1983 study of the emotional and ideological tensions within a group of guerrillas fighting the Portuguese in Angola. 215pp, UK. HEINEMANN AFRICAN WRITERS SERIES.

1996 1983 1980 0435905953 Paperback

New edition. Reality and fiction run side by side, the former feeding into the latter. However, in the territories Jose Eduardo Agualusa crosses, fiction plays a part in reality too. The four characters in the novel which the author is writing as he travels accompany him from Luanda, the capital of Angola, to Benguela and Namibe. They cross the Namibian sands and their ghost towns, reaching Cape Town in South Africa. Then they continue on to Maputo, then Quelimane beside the Bon Sinais River, and thence to the Island of Mazambique. As they drift on, they cross landscapes that border dreams, landscapes from which the strangest characters emerge. Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn. 364pp, UK. ARCADIA.

Augualusa returns to the present, following a journalist who is trying to find out what happened to the Angolan poetess and historian Lidia de Carmo Ferreira. What at first seems like a fictive biogaphy of Ferreira gradually turns out to be a depiction of the devastating history of a country tormented by 30 years of war. 162pp, UK. ARCADIA.

First published in Portuguese in 1995 and now into its fourth reprint, this edition is the first to be published in English. Set in Angola in the late 80s, Pepetela draws on African mythology and history in this scathing critique of Angola's elite. 128pp, UK Heinemann African Writers Series.

Ana knows little about her real mother: she was taken away from Angola before she was two years old. She's got a name, Solange Mendes, and a photograph, which might be her mother, but there are two women in it and she doesn't know whether it is a clue or not. The only thing she knows for sure is she must find Solange. Luanda, Angola, is a long was from Ana's adopted home in Dublin, but it's the only place to start. As the narrative switches between Ana's search and her parents' relationship, beginning with their first meeting in a cafe in 1960s Lisbon, the novel builds a delicate portrait of how a family secret can lie undisturbed for a lifetime. 256pp, UK. SERPENT'S TAIL.

A stranger wafts into a village with no name and sets to whistling as he wanders idly through the church, hypnotising the doves in the rafters and bringing the priest to tears with his haunting tune. Thus begins a week of whispers and gossip that culminates in a Sunday Mass celebrated with orgasmic fervour as the whistler's enchanting tune bewitches the frustrated faithful. Translated by Richard Bartlett. 102pp, UK. AFLAME BOOKS.

A family saga giving a panoramic view of the events that shaped Angola. HARCOURT EDUCATION NETQUOTEVAR:HEINEMANN, 0435909622

1996 Paperback