It's like someone with a mind half Kafka and half Cormac McCarthy, the dreamstates of Doris Lessing, and the ever-loving heart of the mother of everybody lived in the thick of the Mozambiquan civil war, and wrote a book about it.

It's traumatic writing, cracked clear through and showing the other side. War and profiteering and dreams and love, women and animals and monsters. Look: I can't explain this to you, except to say it's a book I read with wide eyes and half-breaths -- maybe I just mean it's an astonishing book. It's all astonishment. How does this exist? How do war and this book coexist on the same world? Somebody else needs to account for it -- I can't.

"After all, I was born at a time when time doesn’t happen. Life, my friends, no longer lets me inside it. I am condemned to perpetual earth, like the whale that gives up the ghost on the beach. If one day I try and live somewhere else, I shall have to carry with me the road that doesn’t let me depart from myself."