Book excerpt: The Blind Fisherman is a compilation of Mia Couto's early short stories - as first presented to the English-speaking world in his two collections Voices Made Night (1990) and Every Man is a Race (1994). Originally written in Portuguese, it was in these collections that Mia Couto first announced himself as a writer of international importance, constructing stories that blended the unique history of Mozambique with a magic realism that was both inspired by and transcendent of the legacy of Portuguese colonialism and the subsequent civil war.