Mozambique has produced some of Africa's finest contemporary literature. Reading a few of these before or during your trip will give the country real depth.
Fiction
Sleepwalking Land (Terra Sonâmbula) by Mia Couto is the place to start. Mozambique's most internationally celebrated writer — and Nobel Prize contender — weaves magical realism through a story set during the civil war, following a boy and an old man sheltering in a burnt-out bus. Beautiful and devastating. Couto's The Tuner of Silences and Under the Frangipani are also excellent.
Niketche: A Story of Polygamy by Paulina Chiziane — Mozambique's first published female novelist — follows a woman who discovers her husband has four other wives and decides to take radical action. Sharp, funny, and unsparing about gender and tradition.
Ualalapi by Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa reconstructs the violent final years of Ngungunhana, the last Tsonga king of the Gaza Empire before Portuguese conquest. Short and intense.
History and non-fiction
A History of Mozambique by Malyn Newitt remains the standard academic account — thorough if dry. For something more readable, William Finnegan's A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique (1992) covers the civil war through on-the-ground reporting and holds up extraordinarily well.
Guns, Germs, and Steel author Jared Diamond devotes discussion to how Mozambique's geography shaped its history — a useful framing for understanding the north-south divide you'll notice travelling the country.
Poetry
José Craveirinha is considered Mozambique's greatest poet — anti-colonial, lyrical, and deeply rooted in Maputo street life. His collected works are harder to find in translation but worth seeking out.