The Book of Chameleons
By Jose Eduardo Agualusa
Arcadia Books £7.99, 180 pages
FT bookshop price: £6.39

From Paul Auster’s Timbuktu to Kirsten Bakis’s Lives of the Monster Dogs, contemporary authors who choose to grant animals language usually do so with dogs. But this novel, translated from the Portuguese, offers sophisticated sentience to a less obvious critter: it is narrated, charmingly, by a chameleon.

Nor is the book a one-trick pony (excuse the animal metaphors): it’s a kind of whodunnit set in Angola, where the central characters’ lives and losses echo the country’s tormented past.

The mystery slowly becomes a meditation on – you guessed it – metamorphosis, which is not to say plot ever loses out to pondering. Or, put another way, the tail never wags the dog.