José Eduardo Agualusa will read from and discuss his book, A General Theory of Oblivion.

On the eve of Angolan independence, an agoraphobic woman named Ludo bricks herself into her Luandan apartment for 30 years, living off vegetables and the pigeons she lures in with diamonds, burning her furniture and books to stay alive and writing her story on the apartment’s walls.

Almost as if we’re eavesdropping, the history of Angola unfolds through the stories of those she sees from her window.

 José Eduardo Agualusa (born 1960) is an Angolan writer. He studied agronomy and forestry in Lisbon before starting his writing career as a poet. His novel Creole was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, and he recently received the U.K.’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the U.K. for The Book of Chameleons. He lives in Luanda and Lisbon.