Woman of the Ashes

In this first book in a trilogy about Portugal's efforts to subdue resurgent native forces in Mozambique in the heyday of colonialism, Sgt. Germano de Melo is punished for his political excesses at home by being exiled to Mozambique to subdue an uprising in the south led by Ngungunyane, the last native leader of the state of Gaza. The sergeant is aided by 15-year-old Imani, who speaks the colonial language and has chosen to side with the Europeans even as her family is split. She instinctively understands that when men wage war, which she likens to a midwife bringing forth another world from inside an older one, the only recourse for a woman is to move about unnoticed as if she were made of shadow or ash. Couto (Confession of the Lioness; Sleepwalking Land), who's deeply aware of the anomalies of his own life—he's a white man in black Mozambique, a scientist among the devoutly religious, a writer in an oral world, and a hopeful pessimist—applies his customary lyricism to the facts of this late 19th-century rebellion.