THE SOCIETY OF RELUCTANT DREAMERS, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

271pp., paperback, First English Language Edition, London, 2019

First published in Portgual in 2017.

Winner of the 2019 Angolan National Prize for Culture and Arts.

A novel set in Angola. Daniel finds a waterproof camera in the sea. He discovers the camera belongs to Moira, a Mozambican artist famous for photographs depicting her dreams. He also realises that Moira is the woman who has appeared repeatedly in his dreams. Daniel and Moira meet and Daniel becomes involved in a project with a Brazilian neuroscientist who is creating a machine to photograph people’s dreams.

“Cross J.M. Coetzee with Gabriel García Márquez and you’ve got José Eduardo Agualusa, Portugal’s next candidate for the Nobel Prize.” Alan Kaufman, author of Matches

José Eduardo Agualusa was born 1960 in Huambo, Angola. He spends most of his time in Portugal, Angola and Brazil, working as a writer and journalist. His novel Creole was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, The Book of Chameleons won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and A General Theory of Oblivion won the Dublin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.