Mia Couto, winner of the Neustadt International Prize, and a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, first became famous as a writer of enchanting short stories. In Rain And Other Stories, one of his most appealing collections, here available in English for the first time, the borders that separate people melt as a poor African country emerges from sixteen years of civil war and assumes its identity as an independent nation.

In these playful, poignant stories of ordinary people, the African oral tale merges into the contemporary short story, magic blends with realism, and the boundaries between Africans and Europeans, men and women, and even the living and the dead, yield before a joyous mixing. Amid visions of water and rain, fishermen and farmers, spiritualists and lovers, experience sparkling new ways of renewing life in a country that is being reborn.