Fado

Fado, a word meaning fate or destiny, refers to a type of music that embodies the Portuguese spirit of yearning.  

Told by a mysterious narrator, Fado is a novelette that spans one year, a year marked by religious and pagan festivals, political holidays and the seasons.  

At the heart of the tale are two characters, Maria Salvador, a Fado singer from Lisbon, and from Porto, Joaquim Oliveira, a veteran of the Colonial War in Mozambique, who suffers from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.  Drawn together by the Douro valley and an English port wine shipper, their separate stories are a haunting song, the two tales resembling the counterpoint of the two guitars that accompany the singer.

It is a song of Portugal, of love and war, rich and poor, superstition and religion, of exile and emigration, of death and injustice, and of course, fate.  It is a story that weaves into a tragic climax as the narrator tries to solve the puzzle: why did Maria Salvador stop singing?

Author Philip Brebner was born in London, educated in Washington DC and also in England.  After studying at the University of Dundee he was awarded a PhD from Glasgow University for his thesis on the ideologies of urban planning in Algeria between 1830 and 1980.  Later he lectured at architecture schools in Jeddah and Oporto, before living in Oxford for three years. There, in 'the city of dreaming spires' he wrote his first novel, A Country of Vanished Dreams, which was published by Picador to critical acclaim, and translated.

As well as fiction, he has published in academic journals and in The Independent. To keep the wolves from the door, he taught creative writing for the British Council and dealt in rare rugs and textiles in Istanbul. In 2004 he and a colleague were invited to design the master plan for a major tourism project in Morocco - an idea that, sad to say, the government put on ice.