The Utopian Generation
Pepetela author David Brookshaw translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Biblioasis
Published:26th Sep '24
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 26th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
- Print run: 2,000 copies
- Co-op available
- Advance reader copies
- Edelweiss digital review copies
- National TV & radio campaign
- National print media campaign
- Online and social media campaign
- In person launch and book signings
- Excerpts in Lit Hub, Electric Lit <
A seminal novel of African decolonization available for the first time in English translation.
Lisbon 1961. Aware that the secret police are watching them, four young Angolans discuss their plans for a utopian homeland free from Portuguese rule. When war breaks out, they flee to France and must decide whether they will return home to join the fight. Two remain in exile and two return to Angola to become guerilla fighters, barely escaping capture over the course of the brutal fourteen-year war. Reunited in the capital of Luanda, the old friends face independence with their confidence shaken and struggle to build a new society free of the corruption and violence of colonial rule.
Pepetela, a former revolutionary guerilla fighter and Angolan government minister, is the author of more than twenty novels that have won prizes in Africa, Europe, and South America. The Utopian Generation is widely considered in the Portuguese-speaking world an essential novel of African decolonization—and is now available in English translation for the first time.
Praise for The Utopian Generation
"Pepetela’s great novels suggest a continuity between generations, a harmonization of differences in a single totality. This urgency of belonging, this structure that contains differences and sets them into conflict, is, in the end, Angola ... Even as time disutopianizes generations, Pepetela remains a generation of his own."
—Mia Couto
"Inspired by lived experiences, the narrative leading voice bravely denounces the state into which a generation's utopia has been transformed. The sound of disillusion in that voice increases as the narrative unfolds, delving into the dirty world of vested interests, murky business deals, and dismal failures. David Brookshaw, the superb translator of great writers such as Mia Couto, José Rodrigues Miguéis, and Raul Brandão, once again produces a rigorous and beautiful translation."
—Onésimo T. Almeida, Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University
"Remarkable on several counts ...The Utopian Generation provides a unique vision of the recent turbulent history of Angolan society as seen by a disillusioned revolutionary.
—World Literature Today
"In The Utopian Generation, Pepetela penetrates inside his characters to understand how they have been shaped by their experience of momentous events. He explores their individual values, their psychology, as well as the most intimate recesses of their minds."
—Ana Mafalda Leite, The Postcolonial Literature of Lusophone Africa
"A novel of epic proportions that offers a multidimensional historical view of three crucial decades of modern Angolan history from 1961 to 1991. It is the first novel to offer a sustained, probing, heart-wrenching as well as in-depth critique of the postcolonial national project."
—Fernando Arenas, Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence
ISBN: 9781771965798
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
456 pages