Carvalho is highly influenced by the work of fellow Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira and by the Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa. Rosa's influence on Carvalho's work can be seem in the novel Desmedida (2006), whose narrative often overlaps with some of the Brazilian author's canon, including intertextual references to Rosa's novel Grande sertão: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands). The book Desmedida (Unmeasured) is deliberately divided between two-halves, but there's a "third half", the metafiction novel A terceira metade (2009), which is announced at the end of Desmedida and is a play on Rosa's short story A terceira margem do rio (The Third Bank of the River).