This recent anthology is the result of a real effort to get a representative selection of fresh and powerful writing from Portugal and Portuguese-speaking (‘Lusophone’) Africa.

Reading the whole anthology through a British reader might be struck with parallels between the experience of the UK and Portugal. There is even an End-of-Empire colony (Macao) awaiting the fateful day of takeover by the Peoples’ Republic of China. There is a fascinating picture of Macao in the story 6 August by João Aguiar.

There is a also certain atmosphere of living in a land resolutely looking backwards, that post-imperial condition suffered by Britain and perhaps now the United States too. One of the best stories is from the pen of Lídia Jorge, considered Portugal’s greatest woman writer. A story that suggests Portugal — perhaps as a result of post-imperial fatigue — is a country where some people at least take the time to meditate on eternal questions.

Another side of Portugal, the famous rural backwardness carefully cultivated during the long years of the Salazar dictatorship, is revealed, reveled in perhaps, by the young writer (b.1965) José Direitinho in Portents; a very good short story that conjures up the reactions of people caught up in fatalistic folk-beliefs. Helena Neves’ Deolinda alludes, in a poetic, experimentalist way, to the other great interrogator of Portuguese life, the huge ocean that it faces, forever tempting its people to foreign adventure.

That too is a parallel with the British experience. Less British is the story that emerges from the African writers in this anthology; Lina Magaia’s searing tale of life and sudden death in Mozambique, where a whole people have been sadly abused by warriors from or sponsored by Portugal and South Africa. Manuel Rui gives an amusing but in fact interestingly detailed picture of everyday life in ‘revolutionary’ Angola while José Luandino Vieira, again set in Angola, contributes The Loves of João Vêncio which is quite Runyonesque; spirited and with an undercurrent of violence. The last African writer here (Portuguese is used officially in five African countries; Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, São Thomé e Principe and Guinea-Bissau) is Mia Couto, a veteran short-story writer from Mozambique, with an extract from his first novel, fascinating and sad, preoccupied, like Lina Magaia with the effects of the long civil war there.

There are also pieces (including an interview) by José Saramago, the lively António Lobo Antunes and Maria Isabel Barreno, last heard of in English in the famous book New Portuguese Letters, recently re-issued.

The Passport anthology is aimed, like this Babel Guide, at bringing the news to the English-speaking world about the fascinating but neglected literature written in the Portuguese language by writers in four continents. Now there’s no excuse to miss out!

‘Deolinda loved the sea so much that she even understood its rages. Because the sea was small it didn’t need to be limited by high walls and ports. She felt its sharp longing for land, its desire to see the fields —close-up, to feel the nearness of the cornfields, to crush the corn with the white teeth of its waves, to change itself into the playful streams, impregnating the neighbouring land with even more salt.’ p115 (Neves Deolinda The Sea)