9 Books About Cape Verde: Fiction, Non-Fiction & Poetry

Inspired by a Football Men’s World Cup underdog story that gripped the globe over the summer, this month we’re reading Cabo Verde / Cape Verde.

This list gathers fiction set in Cape Verde, much of it wrestling with drought, emigration and the pull between the islands and the diaspora; alongside non-fiction books about Cape Verde that trace its story from Portuguese colonisation through liberation to the present day.

Thought some of the titles are difficult to find in translation from Portuguese, I’ve done my best to source what is available.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links and as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. This means I earn a small commission if you choose to make a purchase using a link, but at no cost to you. I’ve included Amazon links to each recommended book as well as Spotify, and Bookshop.org (US and UK) where available.

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Fiction Books Set in Cape Verde

1. Chiquinho by Baltasar Lopes da Silva

Widely considered the first true Cape Verdean novel, Chiquinho follows a boy growing up on the island of São Nicolau: his rural childhood, his move to São Vicente for schooling, a return home just as drought and famine strike, and finally his decision to join his father in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Baltasar Lopes wrote it in 1936, though it wasn’t published until 1947, and it’s loosely drawn from his own life on São Nicolau and São Vicente.

He was a founding member of the literary journal Claridade, the movement credited with starting modern Cape Verdean literature, and he later spent decades as a schoolteacher and headmaster back on the islands he wrote about.

About the author: Baltasar Lopes da Silva (1907–1989) was a Cape Verdean writer, poet and linguist, and co-founder of Claridade, the journal that marked the beginning of modern Cape Verdean literature.

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2. The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida

Translated by Sheila Glaser

Everyone on the island of São Vicente knows Senhor Napumoceno da Silva Araújo: a self-made, deeply respectable businessman, orphaned young, who never married and never wandered from the straight and narrow.

Or so everyone thought, until his 387-page will is read aloud and turns out to be his memoirs, unravelling a secret affair, an illegitimate daughter, and a life far messier than his reputation suggested.

It’s frequently cited as one of the very few widely available works of Cape Verdean fiction in English (though still not easy to find), and mixes real comedy with a surprising amount of tenderness by the end.

About the author: Germano Almeida, born in 1945 on the island of Boavista, is a lawyer as well as a novelist, and is often described as Cape Verde’s greatest living writer.

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3. Chuva Braba (Wild Rain) by Manuel Lopes

Set on the island of Santo Antão, this 1956 novel follows a young farmer, Mané Quim, torn between staying to work his family’s parched land through relentless drought or emigrating to the Amazon, where a godfather promises richer soil and an easier life.

It won Portugal’s Fernão Mendes Pinto prize and is regarded as one of the defining Cape Verdean novels on the pull between homeland and emigration.

An English translation, titled Wild Rain, was produced in the 1980s, though it’s an academic edition and difficult to find in print today; readers without Portuguese may have more luck tracking it down through university libraries than bookshops.

About the author: Manuel Lopes (1907–2005) was, alongside Baltasar Lopes da Silva and Jorge Barbosa, a founder of Claridade, and his fiction returns again and again to the drought and emigration that shaped Cape Verdean life.

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4. The Madwoman of Serrano by Dina Salústio

Translated by Jethro Soutar

This is the first novel published by a woman in Cape Verde, and the first Cape Verdean novel of any kind to be translated into English.

In the isolated village of Serrano, a girl falls from the sky and is raised by a villager named Jerónimo; years later, her daughter Filipa must return to Serrano to make sense of her own past, as the madwoman’s old warnings about the village’s fate start coming true.

It’s magical realism through a distinctly Cape Verdean lens, and was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2020.

About the author: Dina Salústio was born on Santo Antão in 1941 and worked as a teacher, social worker and journalist across Cape Verde, Portugal and Angola before turning to fiction.

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5. Other American Dreams by Sergio F. Monteiro

A crime novel set within the Cape Verdean diaspora, written by an author who spent ten years working on it as a way of exploring a subject close to his own heart: the community’s experience in America.

Proceeds from the book have been donated to the Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS).

It sits alongside a small but growing shelf of fiction written from within the Cape Verdean-American community itself, rather than looking at it from the islands outward.

About the author: Sergio F. Monteiro is a Cape Verdean-American writer whose debut novel drew on a decade of research into the diaspora experience.

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Non-Fiction Books About Cape Verde

1. No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky by Basil Davidson

A key text on the eleven-year armed struggle waged by the PAIGC (the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) against Portuguese colonial rule.

Basil Davidson witnessed much of the conflict firsthand and draws on PAIGC’s own archives, producing one of the earliest detailed accounts of the movement, including the assassination of its founder, Amílcar Cabral.

The edition carries a preface by Cape Verde’s first president, Aristides Pereira, and a foreword by Cabral himself.

It’s less well known than equivalent histories of the liberation struggles in Angola or Mozambique, but stands as one of the essential texts for understanding how Cape Verde won its independence in 1975.

About the author: Basil Davidson (1914–2010) was a British historian and one of the foremost Africanist writers of his generation, particularly known for his work on Portuguese Africa.

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2. História, História: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands by Eleanor Stanford

Eleanor Stanford was twenty-two and newly married when she and her husband joined the Peace Corps and were posted to Cape Verde.

Part travelogue and part cultural documentary, the memoir sits her own unravelling (she was quietly developing an eating disorder during her time there) alongside the islands’ own history of famine, slavery and emigration, and won the 2014 Peace Corps Writers Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award.

About the author: Eleanor Stanford served in the Peace Corps in Cape Verde from 1998 to 2000, and is also the author of two poetry collections, Bartram’s Garden and The Book of Sleep.

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Poetry from Cape Verde

1. Cape Verdean Blues by Shauna Barbosa

Named after jazz pianist Horace Silver’s 1966 album of the same title, this debut collection was a Lit Hub favourite book of 2018 and was nominated for PEN America’s Open Book Award.

Barbosa, born in Boston to an African-American mother and Cape Verdean father, writes poems steeped in sodade* and the particular texture of growing up between two cultures, threaded through with Cape Verdean Creole.

*Difficult to translate, this word describes a kind of longing; a particular ache of the sea and the people it carries away.

About the author: Shauna Barbosa grew up in Roxbury, Boston, and received her MFA from Bennington College; Cape Verdean Blues is her debut collection.

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2. Poets of Cape Verde: A Bilingual Selection

A Portuguese-English anthology gathering work from across the history of Cape Verdean poetry, translated by Frederick G. Williams and published as part of a wider series covering Lusophone African poetry.

For readers who want to go beyond the handful of Cape Verdean writers available as standalone English translations, this is one of the more accessible ways into the wider tradition, including poets who never had individual collections translated.

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Other Cape Verdean Writers

Through researching this list (and others as part of a Read Around the World Challenge), my understanding is that Cape Verdean literature is far richer than what currently exists in English translation.

Writers like Orlanda Amarílis (the first Cape Verdean woman to publish a book-length work of fiction), Jorge Barbosa, Arménio Vieira and Corsino Fortes are essential names in the archipelago’s literary history, even where full English translations of their work are hard to come by.

Words Without Borders put together a collection specifically to plug this gap: Writing from Cabo Verde, featuring newly translated fiction and poetry from contemporary Cape Verdean writers who may not yet have full English editions of their own. It’s a good place to start if this list leaves you wanting more.

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Wider African Reading

An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi

Though not specific to Cape Verde, this is a valuable piece of wider context that cropped up several times during my research.

It’s a good place to start for readers, like myself, who are very much new to African literature, history and context.

Zeinab Badawi’s sweeping history traces the continent from the origins of humanity through ancient civilisations and medieval empires to colonisation and independence, researched across more than thirty African countries and told, as much as possible, through African voices rather than Western narrators.

It was shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards and was a Sunday Times bestseller.

About the author: Zeinab Badawi is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist, born in Sudan, and is President of SOAS University of London.

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More Books About Cape Verde

Cape Verde has produced an outsized literary tradition for its population of around 500,000, yet only a handful of its novels exist in English at all, and several of those are out of print or hard to track down.

If you have more Cape Verde book recommendations to help me expand this list, let me know in the comments.

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