In his novel Rainy Season, Agualusa returns to the present again. What at first seems like the fictive biography of the Angolan poetess and historian Lídia do Carmo Ferreira, gradually turns out to be a depiction of the devastating history of a country tormented by 30 years of war.

A journalist – the autobiographical features are quite deliberate – is trying to find out what happened to Lídia, who disappeared in Luanda in 1992, a point in time when the civil war flared up again with unprecedented ferocity after rebel leader Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA movement refused to accept defeat in the country’s first free and democratic elections. The story, a tangled mesh of facts and fiction, tells of the disappointment of the two protagonists, which represents the disappointment of a whole nation.