I don’t want to say “I’ve discovered this amazing author and you have to read his books” in case you say “Oh him, yeah I read his books ages ago, they’re rubbish”. Although I don’t think that’s very likely – at lease not the latter part; José Eduardo Agualusa’s books are amazing and his The Book of Chameleons won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007.

How do you usually come across an author whose work you haven’t read before? A recommendation perhaps, maybe a catchy book cover, or just pure chance? Well I picked up The Book of Chameleons by chance one day, with some time to kill, and rarely have I read anything so lyrical, so charming, so true and sensitive and magical and down to earth all at the same time, without a hint of corniness or sentimentality.

It tells the story of Félix Ventura, as told by a lizard who lives on the walls and ceilings of his house. Félix makes a living inventing people’s genealogies and ancestries; he can create respectability for a politician or noble ancestry for al local businessman using his archives of newspaper cuttings, books and videos. A mysterious stranger enters Félix’s house one day and asks him to craft him a new identity. Around this time, Félix meets a beautiful woman called Ângela Lúcia and falls in love with her. His quiet and ordered life is dragged reluctantly into theirs.

You could read Félix’s story as a simple shortish novel – a love story full of deliberate coincidences set against a backdrop of political turmoil in Angola. But The Book of Chameleons is so much more than this; it is a book about different realities, irrealities, false identities, false memories, manufactured truths, imagined truths and created identities. The story, or rather Félix’s reality, spirals into confusion as the mysterious stranger manages to find evidence of the mother Félix created for him; Ângela Lúcia and the stranger appear to know each other and the outside world begins to invade the sanctuary of his home.

What do you do when you find, totally by chance, an amazing book by an author you’ve never read before? Try and get hold of everything else he’s written of course. In this case, we’re not so lucky, because Agualusa writes in Portugese, and not all of his work has been translated into English, but one of these is My Father's Wives .

My Father's Wives is a sort of road trip of discovery as a Portuguese woman travels across southern Africa from Angola through Namibia and South Africa to Mozambique to trace the footsteps of her late father. She never knew her father, the celebrated Angolan musician Faustino Manso who has just died, leaving behind seven widows and eighteen children. The book reflects the atmosphere that Agualusa gives to Angola; a big melting pot of cultures, races, colours, ancestries, stories, histories, lives, plot twists, coincidences and surprises.

Laurentina brings with her a reluctant boyfriend Mandume; raised in Portugal of Angolan parents, he has disowned the country of his ancestors and proclaims himself Portugese, and Bartolomeu, her new ‘nephew’ whom she meets at her father’s funeral. Their driver is Pouca Sorte; a man of many secrets whose car knows the road so well, he can sleep while he’s driving.

To add to the layering of realities, the book contains a separate but parallel strand of notebook entries of Agualusa’s own journey with documentary-maker Karen Boswell. Laurentina’s character is actually invented by Karen and Agualusa as the story develops.

Their journey introduces us to a host of unlikely characters, eccentric loations, and some curious situations, all connected somehow, either through Faustino Manso’s paternity, or through a series of unbelievably believable coincidences.

Also translated into English are Rainy Season , in which a journalist is trying to find out what happened to Angolan poetess and historian Lĺdia do Carmo Ferreira, who disappeared in Luanda in 1992 and Creole , set in Angola in the nineteenth century.

These are the sort of books that you reread as soon as you finish the last page, whose scenes replay themselves in your mind throughout the day and whose characters stay with you long after you have read their story. Would that every chance book I happen to pick up introduce me to an author so remarkable.