José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons, 2004

In the Angolan capital Luanda, Félix Ventura is a man who creates your past – if you don’t like yours, he can come up with a new one. The book’s narrator is a gecko, also with a past life as a human, but who necessarily adopts a lizard-on-the-wall style of narration. The storytelling allows you to see the small ensemble of shifty characters from just about every angle, in a way that suggests the transience of identities and the influence of memories, real or created: everyone in this book changes who they are to various degrees. The Latin American influence on The Book of Chameleons is self-evident given that it was written in Portuguese, but ah, if only more African writing was as imaginative as this. Excellent.   PY

•  The Book of Chameleons is the first Angolan novel to be translated into English, and also won the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.