Synopsis: In The Mad Woman of Serrano, Dina Salústio tells us that in the isolated village of Serrano, a madwoman roams — but is she truly mad, or simply too wise and too outspoken for her world to accept? When a mysterious child appears and grows up torn between two worlds, Dina Salústio weaves myth, memory, and female defiance into the first novel by a woman ever published in Cape Verde.
In the remote village of Serrano, a woman wanders the streets, dismissed by everyone as mad. But her wild babbling carries an unsettling weight — as if she sees what others refuse to.
When a girl is discovered abandoned in the forest, taken in and raised by a villager named Jerónimo, the child, Filipa, grows up caught between the old world of Serrano and the ambitions calling her toward the city. Years later, as a successful businesswoman far from home, Filipa finds the memories of her childhood — and her strange bond with the madwoman — refusing to stay buried.
Salústio moves fluidly between realism and myth, letting ancient rites and superstition brush against modern ambition without ever fully resolving the tension between them. At its heart, the novel asks an uncomfortable question: how much of what we call madness in a woman is really just the world’s refusal to hear her? As Serrano’s fragile world is threatened by an outside development project, past and present collide, pulling Filipa and Jerónimo back toward one another.
As the first novel by a female author ever published in Cape Verde — and the first Cape Verdean novel translated into English — The Madwoman of Serrano is a landmark of the country’s literature, praised for the way it lets realism and magic collide against a backdrop of ancient rites and modern change.
Buy The Madwoman of Serrano Book Now
- Title: The Madwoman of Serrano
- Author: Dina Salústio (translated from Portuguese by Jethro Soutar)
- Publisher: Dedalus Books (Dedalus Africa series)
- Publication date: 2020 (English translation)
- ISBN-13: 9781910213988
- Pages: 224–228 pages (varies slightly by printing)
- Genre: Literary fiction / Magical realism (Cape Verdean literature)
- Format: Paperback
- Condition: New
- Availability: Available
- Price: KES500
Notable: The first novel by a female author published in Cape Verde, and the first translated into English; shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2020. Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, it’s a quietly powerful read for anyone drawn to stories of women written out of their own histories.
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