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Yasin is driving through Europe with his seven year old son Leo, not sure where they're going. He just knows that he's 37, about to be divorced, and that this is his last chance to explain to Leo who he is and where he comes from. The problem is that Yasin isn't sure of the answers himself.
_______________ 'A wonderfully subtle exploration of place, identity and memory' - PD Smith, Guardian 'A highly readable and authoritative celebration of a little-understood country and its capital city' - Geographical 'A travelogue and memoir to rank alongside anything by Chatwin or Thubron' - Jim Crace 'A most absorbing and rewarding book' - Michael Palin _______________ A moving portrait, part history, part memoir, of Sudan – once the largest, most diverse country in Africa – and its self-destruction In 1956, Sudan gained independence from Britain. On the brink of a promising future, it instead descended into civil war and conflict. When the 1989 coup brought a hard-line Islamist regi...
Liverpool, 1958, and German refugee and inventor Ernst Frager is in search of a sense of belonging. What he finds is an unusual nightclub on the Mersyside docks, and Miranda: hat-check girl, aspiring jazz singer and daughter of West Indian immigrants. Their doomed love affair will have repercussions for the children waiting for Ernst back in London, but also for the daughter Miranda gives birth to. Almost half a century later, Jade finds herself grappling with the very questions that drove her father into the arms of her mother, and realising that a successful career cannot define an identity; nor can you separate your existence from all the many other stories connected to it ... Like the ja...
Nineteenth-century Sudan, wracked by religious, cultural, and political differences, is brilliantly evoked in the most ambitious book yet by this talented novelist. This, Mahjoub's latest novel, centers around the Battle of Omdurman---one of the great colonial wars in Britian's attempt to gain control over the Sudan. Mahojoub brings this period to life with perception, honesty, and integrity. This is a story of fighting men, most Sudanese but some British; some showed wisdom, but for the most part they were either mad or misguided. Mahjoub writes with a profound, poetic intensity that illuminates a wide range of characters; from the cook to the Mahdi, from an Arab prostitute to the gentle Hawi, whose powerful message combines with the judgment and blindness of the other characters to bind the story together in a satisfying yet disturbing way.
A lost child. A missing hero. A bitter rivalry. In Cairo the ghosts of the past are stirring... The ancient city of Cairo is a whirling mix of the old and the new, where fates collide and the super rich rub shoulders with the desperate and the dispossessed. It is a place where ambition and corruption go hand in hand, and where people can disappear in the blink of an eye. Makana is a former police inspector who fled for his life from his native Sudan seven years ago. Down on his luck and haunted by the past, he lives on a rickety Nile houseboat. When the notorious and powerful Saad Hanafi hires him to track down a missing person Makana is in no position to refuse him. Hanafi, whose past is as...
In this brilliantly clever fictionalised memoir, award-winning author Jamal Mahjoub interrogates how the first generation of Northern Sudanese citizens undertook the momentous task of creating a newly independent nation. Exiled in a dilapidated hotel in South-West France, Sharif looks back on his rich and eventful life to date. Memories of a bohemian existence in England and France – a time of love affairs and excess – clash with more recent memories of navigating the volatile and unprecedented political situation in North Africa. With wry wit, Sharif recalls the wealth of extraordinary characters who have passed through his life and tries to make sense of an existence lived in disarray.
Brenda Cooper examines the work of the new generation of African writers who have placed migration as central to their writing
The Kamanga Kings, a Khartoum jazz band of yesteryear, is presented with the opportunity of a lifetime when a surprise letter arrives inviting them to perform in Washington, D.C. The only problem is . . . the band no longer exists. Rushdy, a disaffected secondary school teacher and the son of an original Kamanga King, sets out to revive the band. All too soon an unlikely group are on their way, knowing the eyes of their country are on them. As they move from the familiarity of Khartoum to the chaos of Donald Trump’s America, Jamal Mahjoub weaves a gently humorous and ultimately universal tale of music, belonging and love.
When two bodies are found brutally murdered at a building site in Battersea, DS Cal Drake is first to the scene. He sees an opportunity: to solve a high-profile case and to repair his reputation after a botched undercover operation almost ended his promising career in the Violent Crimes Unit. Assigned to work with the forensic psychologist Dr Rayhana Crane, and on the hunt for an elusive killer, Drake’s investigations lead down the dark corridors of the past – to the Iraq war and the destruction both he and Crane witnessed there. With a community poised on the brink of violence, Crane and Drake must put their lives on the line to stop the killer before vengeance is unleashed.