Books
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Travelling with Djinns
Chatto & Windus, London 2010
Yasin Zahir, a man with two passports and more than two languages, is headed for a divorce from his "English-English" wife Ellen. Encouraged by her to spend time with their son Leo while she communes with distant Danish cousins, Yasin sets out with his seven-year-old on an "educational trip" driven partly by fear of losing his child.
Winner of the Prix de l’Astrolabe in France. -
The Drift Latitudes
Chatto & Windus, London 2006
From typewriters to submarine warfare, taking in the architectural heritage of the slave trade, and civil war in independent Africa, The Drift Latitudes is a complex, moving novel that examines how people deal with the dilemmas of the world we live in. A remarkable and poignant story of our times.
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Nubian Indigo
Actes Sud, France 2006
Argin, a government administrator, is charged with evacuating the towns and villages that are about to be flooded thanks to the Aswan High Dam. Slowly he becomes aware of the enormity of what is about to be lost when the long history of Nubia is silenced by the rising waters.
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The Carrier
Phoenix House, London 1998
This is a richly evocative and highly intelligent novel about a man's quest for enlightenment. It marks the arrival of an extremely distinctive young novelist
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In The Hour of Signs
Heinemann, African Writers Series, Oxford 1996
The story of Sudan's struggle for independence in the closing stages of the 19th century and the events which led to the British Reconquest and the founding of the modern Sudan.
The novel recounts the rise of the Mahdi - self-declared successor to the Prophet Mohammed, and the sequence of events that led to the ‘Reconquest’ of the Sudan in 1898, seen from the perspective of a cast of ordinary people whose lives are caught up in the turning wheels of history.
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Wings of Dust
Heinemann African Writers Series, Oxford 1994
Stranded in a run-down hotel on the Atlantic coast in France, Sharif Turab looks back over his life in an effort to try to understand the ambitions he and his generation had for their newly independent continent and to ask where everything went wrong.
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Navigation of a Rainmaker
Heinemann African Writers Series, Oxford 1989
Tanner, a young man of mixed race, travels to his father’s home country for the first time. Feeling alienated in Britain, he believes the only way he will be at peace is to explore the side of him he feels he does not yet know. Finding himself in the midst of an escalating civil war, however, Tanner discovers that belonging means having to decide which side he is on.