Vinte e Zinco

Written to mark the 25th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, Twenty and Zinc is a short novel that recounts the daily life of a family in a small Mozambican town on the eve of April 25, 1974.

Having had close relatives, such as my father, mother, grandparents, and uncles, who lived in Mozambique, and having recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of April 25, it was a work that generated considerable curiosity.

The story intertwines the voices of colonizers and colonized, while news of the revolution slowly arrives in a world still suspended in colonial time.

What makes the novel remarkable is its refusal to celebrate or condemn, always debating the issue of belonging and identity of its different characters, who were ultimately all prisoners of a distant regime.

Liberation does not come as a triumph, but as perplexity, with the sudden absence of rules and personal reckoning.