Will I love Season of Migration to the North?

I planned to read this book for research but ended up so immersed in the story that I kept forgetting to take notes. The narrative, a “clever inversion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” follows the travels and travails of a young protagonist tangled in the contradictions of his African childhood, his formal education in England, and his return home with what he sees as the boon of modern thought. Part mystery, part romance, part history, part monomyth, part psychological thriller, the novel is set in an “unsettled and violent no-man’s-land between…tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement...” This book fascinated… show more.

As much as I love Cairo, I am happiest on the Nile in Sudan, Egypt’s tumultuous, less-trammeled neighbor. It’s in Sudan, at Omdurman, where the Blue Nile and White Nile meet in a sturdy, 30-million-year-old marriage that birthed and has sustained both Egyptian and Sudanese civilization. Set in a Nile village in 1960s Sudan, Tayeb Salih’s classic novella is a wistful, affecting story of post-colonial exile that’s been compared with the works of Franz Fanon and Joseph Conrad. Season of Migration to the North is packed with references to Shakespeare, Islamic history, Arabic poetry, Freud, and contemporary fiction. You feel… show more.