Five books by writers from Sudan, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Season of Migration to the North and Lyrics Alley.
Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, set in a Nile village and in Khartoum after independence, is the best-known novel from Sudan. Salih wrote it in Arabic, and it reached English readers in translation. Sudan became independent in 1956 after decades of joint British and Egyptian rule, and its fiction often looks back on that colonial legacy and on the Mahdist uprising of the 1880s. Today Sudanese writers work in both Arabic and English, some of them living abroad.
Leila Aboulela's Lyrics Alley places a wealthy merchant family in 1950s Omdurman as independence approaches. Jamal Mahjoub's In the Hour of Signs looks at the siege of Khartoum in the 1880s through Sudanese eyes. Daoud Hari's The Translator is a memoir of village life and the Darfur genocide, by a man who guided journalists through the conflict.
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A village on the Nile and Khartoum in the post-independence years, with colonial legacy and rural tradition shaping a returning narrator.
A wealthy merchant family in 1950s Omdurman, caught between tradition, cotton-trade modernity, nationalism and Sudan's approach to independence.
A Darfuri memoir of village life and the Darfur genocide, told by a man who guided journalists through the conflict.
A historical novel of the Mahdist uprising and the siege of Khartoum in the 1880s, told through Sudanese eyes.
Follows an orphaned brother and sister through the Mahdist uprising of the 1880s, showing Nile communities, Khartoum's fall and Sudan's religious and colonial upheavals.
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