Elsewhere, Home: Book Review
Agencies – Sudan Events
In her new collection of stories, award-winning New York Times Notable author Leila Aboulela offers us a rich tableau of life as an immigrant abroad, and the challenges of navigating assimilation and difference.
Elsewhere, Home draws us ineluctably into the lives of her characters as they forge new identities and reshape old ones.
A young woman’s encounter with a former classmate elicits painful reminders of her former life in Khartoum.
A wealthy Sudanese student studying in Aberdeen begins an unlikely friendship with a Scottish man.
A woman experiences an evolving relationship to her favorite writer, whose portrait of their shared culture both reflects and conflicts with her own sense of identity.
Shuttling between the dusty, sunbaked streets of Khartoum and the university halls and cramped apartments of Aberdeen and London, Elsewhere, Home explores, with subtlety and restraint, the profound feelings of yearning, loss, and alienation that come with leaving one’s homeland in pursuit of a different life.
Leila Aboulela is the first-ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing.
Nominated three times for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction), she is the author of numerous novels, including The Kindness of Enemies, The Translator, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, which was Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages.
She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and now lives in Aberdeen, Scotland.
