Here are 100 books that Khartoum at Night fans have personally recommended if you like
Khartoum at Night.
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I am a writer and an Arabic to English translator, with a PhD in Arabic Theatre from the University of Edinburgh. In recent years, I have gravitated towards the history of popular culture and the demi-monde in the Middle East. The stories of singers and dancers say much more to me than the conventional subjects of histories of the Arab world – politicians, soldiers, etc. Through them, we can see the Middle East in a way that we seldom see in the West means much more to a lot of the people who live there.
Ziad Fahmy’s book on the importance of popular culture in the history of modern Egypt and the anti-British revolution of 1919 was a real landmark. Bringing together songs, jokes, vaudeville plays, and more, he manages to draw out a story of Egyptian anti-colonial, nationalism that is not confined to elite circles or confined by bourgeois morality. This is history from the streets. Although it is an academic book, it is written with an engaging style that captures some of the excitement of this period. Published in 2011, Fahmy’s book opened up space for research and writing on the history of Arabic pop culture.
The popular culture of pre-revolution Egypt did more than entertain-it created a nation. Songs, jokes, and satire, comedic sketches, plays, and poetry, all provided an opportunity for discussion and debate about national identity and an outlet for resistance to British and elite authority. This book examines how, from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity.
Ordinary Egyptians shifts the typical focus of study away from the intellectual elite to understand the rapid politicization of the growing literate middle classes…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I am a writer and an Arabic to English translator, with a PhD in Arabic Theatre from the University of Edinburgh. In recent years, I have gravitated towards the history of popular culture and the demi-monde in the Middle East. The stories of singers and dancers say much more to me than the conventional subjects of histories of the Arab world – politicians, soldiers, etc. Through them, we can see the Middle East in a way that we seldom see in the West means much more to a lot of the people who live there.
Published in French or Arabic, this richly and attractively illustrated book dives headfirst into nostalgia for the nightlife of the 20th century Middle East. Loaded with short vignettes and stories, accompanied by Ziade’s own drawings, this book takes the reader on a tour of nightclubs in Cairo and across the wider Middle East. It is a beautiful, misty-eyed elegy for a lost age.
Dans ce livre il y a les cabarets du Caire, les studios, villas, casinos du Caire, les maris, les amants, l'alcool, les somnifères, l'argent, les suicides, les brownings, les scandales, les palaces. Il y a le chant, la musique, la voix, les ovations, les triomphes, la gloire. Il y a l'audace, le génie, l'aventure, la tragédie. Il y a des poètes et des émirs, des danseuses, des banquiers, des officiers, des imams, des cheikhs, des actrices, des khawagates, des musiciens, des vamps, des noctambules, des révoltés, des sultans, des pachas, des beys, des espionnes, des prodiges, des rois d'Égypte et…
I am a writer and an Arabic to English translator, with a PhD in Arabic Theatre from the University of Edinburgh. In recent years, I have gravitated towards the history of popular culture and the demi-monde in the Middle East. The stories of singers and dancers say much more to me than the conventional subjects of histories of the Arab world – politicians, soldiers, etc. Through them, we can see the Middle East in a way that we seldom see in the West means much more to a lot of the people who live there.
The Sudanese music scene of the 1970s is legendary. With stars like jazz king Sharhabil Ahmed and the girl group al-Balabil, the Nile was really swinging. Jamal Mahjoub, a British-Sudanese author who also writes crime fiction under the name Parker Bilal, has fun with this golden age in his new novel, The Fugitives. An English teacher in Sudan receives a surprise invitation to perform in America and has to re-form his father’s old band, The Kamanga Kings, who rocked Sudan in the years before Omar al-Bashir’s dictatorship and take them to Trump’s America.
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 is a disaffected secondary school teacher and the son of an original Kamanga King. Determined to see a life beyond his own home, he sets out to revive the band. Aided by his unreliable best friend, all too soon an unlikely group are on their way, knowing the eyes of their country are on them.
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I am a writer and an Arabic to English translator, with a PhD in Arabic Theatre from the University of Edinburgh. In recent years, I have gravitated towards the history of popular culture and the demi-monde in the Middle East. The stories of singers and dancers say much more to me than the conventional subjects of histories of the Arab world – politicians, soldiers, etc. Through them, we can see the Middle East in a way that we seldom see in the West means much more to a lot of the people who live there.
The essential biography of Umm Kulthum for the English reader. Danielson tells the story of the Arab world’s most famous singer, one of the greatest performers of the 20th century. This book charts her life from the small village in the Nile Delta where she grew up to the heights of global superstardom. It also paints a picture of the world that she moved through, which intersected with the world depicted in Midnight in Cairo. This is a necessary read for anyone interested in Arabic music.
Umm Kuthum was a celebrated musical performer in the Arab world, and her songs still permeate the international airwaves. This, the first English-language biography, chronicles her life and career. In particular, it examines her popularity in a society which discouraged women from public performance. The text examines the careful construction of Kulthum's popularity; from childhood her mentors honed her abilities to accord with Arab and Muslim practice, but ultimately, she created her own idiom from local precedents and traditions, and developed original song styles from both populist and neo-classical traditions. Danielson seeks to show how Umm Kulthum's music and public…
In the 1950s, my mother and father left the red dirt of Oklahoma for the forests of Idaho to escape their families’ poverty. Instead of sharecropping, my father became a logger, but my aunt and her husband, a drilling rig roughneck, moved to the deserts of Saudi Arabia to work for Aramco and live in the American compound of Abqaiq. I remember the gifts they brought me: camel hide purses, Aladdin slippers. The Saudis, too, were experiencing rapid modernization and expanding wealth. I became fascinated by the conflict inherent in the sudden enmeshing of cultures and meteoric shift in power and privilege.
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 and haunted me even as it informed me about the complexities, dichotomies, and dissonance of colonization. Shot through with “allusions to Arabic and European fiction, Islamic history, Shakespeare, Freud, and classical Arabic poetry,” Salih’s novel should first be read for what it is: a brilliant work of art.
After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood—the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led…
Why me / this list? Well, as a kid of parents whose cities were blitzed, I spent my early years in a tiny English village, eventually walking to school through the graveyard of a 12th-century church. We moved to Canada when I was eight, and a whole new history bloomed – Iroquois and coureur de bois were magnetic! As I evolved into a voracious reader, Lee, Orwell, and Vonnegut got me into the complexity of people. Now I’m compelled to read (and write) stories centered on how experiences shape us as individuals, and as societies.
P.S. Shortly after my departure, archeologists found Roman ruins under that tiny English village.
A “fictional autobiography” that has really stuck with me, What is the What is based on the real-life experiences of Valentino Achak Deng, who survived the brutality and terror of Sudan’s second civil war.
At six or seven years old, he was separated from his parents when his village, Mariel Bai, was virtually wiped out by militia. Against all odds, he ultimately made it all the way to the United States, only to experience injustice, violence, and cruelty again.
Incredibly, the real story told in What is the What is one of hope and resilience, and it’s a powerful reminder that chance and circumstances are the only differences between us and anyone else on this planet. Gee, I don’t know… maybe we should all act accordingly?
P.S. Somewhat controversial for its “autobiographical” claim despite being novelized—some say appropriated—by another person, What is the What was required reading at numerous US…
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children —the so-called Lost Boys—was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom.
When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges. Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I have spent more than 30 years in my lab at Columbia University studying how seemingly intractable conflicts develop and the conditions under which they change. I'm a professor at Columbia, a social psychologist who has studied, taught, and written about conflict for decades. I'm also a mediator, facilitator, and consultant who has worked with divided groups and communities around the world. I direct the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia, where we run the Difficult Conversations Lab, an audio/video/physio “capture lab” where we systematically study the dynamics of divisive moral conflicts to try to understand when encounters over them go well and when they go terribly wrong.
If you are interested in gaining a better understanding of why the UN fails so miserably at building and sustaining peace – read this new book. Adam Day works at the UN and uses ideas from complexity science to both explain why the UN is so challenged in its ultimate mission to sustain peace, and what it should do to move in the right direction. Day uses two current case studies on some of the most challenging situations faced by the international community and applies new ideas in useful and practical ways. This is the state-of-the-art of complexity-informed peacebuilding.
Today's vision of world order is founded upon the concept of strong, well-functioning states, in contrast to the destabilizing potential of failed or fragile states. This worldview has dominated international interventions over the past 30 years as enormous resources have been devoted to developing and extending the governance capacity of weak or failing states, hoping to transform them into reliable nodes in the global order. But with very few exceptions, this project has not delivered on its promise: countries like Somalia, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) remain mired in conflict despite decades of international…
I began my career as a journalist, including working as a reporter on an international newspaper. I left full-time journalism to write fiction where I can combine an interest in international affairs with stories of characters and issues of the heart which drive individuals and often shape events. Over the years I’ve worked and traveled with international organizations, serving as Vice President of PEN International, and on the boards and in other roles focusing on human rights, education, and refugees. I’ve been able to travel widely and witness events up close, walking along the edge of worlds and discovering the bonds that keep us from falling off.
This story is set in Sudan among rebel leaders in a war-torn country with hardened guerillas, idealistic aid workers, evangelical young women, and a pilot responsible for bringing aid and people in and out of the area. I was quickly drawn into this complex world through the varied voices and life experiences of the characters, especially as an unlikely and tragic romance emerges.
History, politics, and the human heart are all in play. As a reader I struggled along with the characters as the narrative took on fraught moments of international intrigue and probed the hearts and emotions of the characters, suggesting that in the end, politics is an extension of the human heart in conflict, often in conflict with itself.
Philip Caputo’s tragic and epically ambitious new novel is set in Sudan, where war is a permanent condition. Into this desolate theater come aid workers, missionaries, and mercenaries of conscience whose courage and idealism sometimes coexist with treacherous moral blindness. There’s the entrepreneurial American pilot who goes from flying food and medicine to smuggling arms, the Kenyan aid worker who can’t help seeing the tawdry underside of his enterprise, and the evangelical Christian who comes to Sudan to redeem slaves and falls in love with a charismatic rebel commander.
As their fates intersect and our understanding of their characters deepens,…
I love most all genre fiction, but I’m a sucker for dark fiction—and I have a particular fondness for dark fiction that explores the hidden shadows of men and women as they make dubious choices that lead to consequences rife with fear, despair, and unflinching terror. Whether it’s young men meeting in a basement to engage in a secret barbaric club or a world gone mad following the literal death of God, my favorite dark fiction is woven with sly satire and subversive social commentary.
Ron Currie Jr. has written some of my very favorite books that explore big ideas through a dark, satirical lens. My favorite of Currie’s books is God Is Dead, which is a collection of interconnected stories that wonders what the world—and, more importantly, humanity—would look like if God took human form…then died. Each story looks at different characters and how they have responded to the reality of God’s death, from a group of teenagers who make a suicide pact to an epidemic of parents worshipping their children in the absence of God. Each story works together to explore larger themes of religion, violence, and the purpose of life.
The electrifying, "cutting-edge" (USA Today) debut work of fiction from Ron Currie, author of the forethcoming novel The One-Eyed Man (March 2017)
Ron Currie's gutsy, funny book is instantly gripping: If God takes human form and dies, what would become of life as we know it? Effortlessly combining outlandish humor with big questions about mortality, ethics, and human weakness, Ron Currie, Jr., holds a funhouse mirror to our present-day world. God has inhabited the mortal body of a young Dinka woman in the Sudan. When she is killed in the Darfur desert, he dies along with her, and word of…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I am a scholar of international politics and history who has taught in Northern Uganda, spent years interviewing political and military elites in Congo, Eritrea, and Sudan, and worked on climate agriculture and water in Ethiopia and Somalia. In my work on the continent and at Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia University, I try not only to understand the material realities that define the options available to diverse African communities but also the ideas, in all their potential and contradictions, that give shape to how African societies interact internally and engage the outside world. I hope the books on this list will inspire you as much as they did for me.
By a considerable distance, the most gripping novel I have devoured on gender roles in the long shadow of the loss of home. Several of the book’s characters and defining scenes in the refugee camp remain haunting years after I first encountered them.
Suleiman Addonia’s dissection of the entangled shocks wrought by cultural change, war, and displacement drips with emotional contrasts. This book feels, at times, unbearably intrusive, as the reader is exposed to the most privately held fears and embarrassments of its protagonists.
Simultaneously, the book beautifully underscores how valuable (at least some) intimacy remains for those who feel that the future has already bypassed them.
A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos.
For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced…
