Transparent City

By: Ondjaki

Narrated by: Sam Peters

A Vanity Fair Hot Type Book for April 2018

A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2018

A Lit Hub Favourite Book of the Year

In a crumbling apartment block in the Angolan city of Luanda, families work, laugh, scheme, and get by. In the middle of it all is the melancholic Odonato, nostalgic for the country of his youth and searching for his lost son. As his hope drains away and as the city outside his doors changes beyond all recognition, Odonato’s flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless.

A captivating blend of magical realism, scathing political satire, tender comedy, and literary experimentation, Transparent City offers a gripping and joyful portrait of urban Africa quite unlike any before yet published in English, and places Ondjaki, indisputably, among the continent’s most accomplished writers.

©2012, 2018 Ondjaki by arrangement with Literarische Agentur Mertin Inh. Nicole Witt E. K. Frankfurt am Main, Germany; first published in Portuguese as Os Transparentes, Caminho, Lisbon, Portugal. Translation copyright Stephen Henighan. (P)2019 Audible, Inc.