Elsewhere, Home

Starred review from October 22, 2018
This fantastic collection of stories from Aboulela (Lyrics Alley) examines the alienation of individuals torn between two societies. The 13 tales involve disparate protagonists, but all focus on culture, religion, and identity. In “Something Old, Something New,” a Scotsman travels to Khartoum to marry his Sudanese fiancée. In “The Boy from the Kebab Shop,” the secular daughter of a Scottish father and Egyptian mother finds herself attracted to a devout Muslim man. “The Museum” features a doomed romance between an affluent Sudanese student and a provincial but brilliant Scottish classmate. The collection’s highlight, “Souvenirs,” follows an oil rig worker searching for paintings in Khartoum in order to show his Scottish wife the “malleable pieces, not the random whole” that represent his complex childhood and nation. Each story is earnest and engrossing, holding surprising depth for tales so compact. Aboulela confronts and dissects Western and African stereotypes of Islam, Muslims, and immigrants, and beautifully renders the more universal challenge of cultural homelessness. Eleven of these stories have been previously published, and read together, they wonderfully coalesce. Visiting many of the themes she grapples with in her novels, Aboulela ties together her expanding oeuvre with this poignant, impressive collection.

December 1, 2018
Tales that take readers from Scotland to Sudan.Aboulela has earned international acclaim for her fiction. Her work has appeared in prestigious journals, and one story republished here--"The Museum"--won the Caine Prize for African writing. In novels like Minaret (2005) and The Translator (1999), the author has given voice to characters who choose to--or are forced to--navigate two worlds, and she explores themes of immigration, alienation, and assimilation in the stories collected here. A chance encounter with a former classmate on a flight from Sudan to England compels a young woman to reconsider the choices she's made in "The Ostrich." The heroine of "Summer Maze" is the teenager Nadia; when the girl leaves her home in London to visit Egypt with her mother, Aboulela captures the complexity of her identity in passages like this one: "In Cairo, she was a stranger, but a stranger who went unnoticed, who was not tricked into paying extra for taxi rides and souvenirs." A Scottish convert to Islam travels to Khartoum to meet his fiancee's family in "Something Old, Something New," and his experience isn't quite what he expects. "He had thought, from the books he'd read and the particular British Islam he had been exposed to, that in a Muslim country he would find elegance and reason. Instead he found melancholy, a sensuous place, life stripped to the bare bones." Such passages of clarity and insight are all too rare in this collection, though. Aboulela seldom dips beneath the surface of the narrative, and, when she does, she doesn't linger. Given that so many of the settings and situations are similar across these stories, a sense of sameness sets in. And some of the shorter entries feel more like writing exercises or gestures toward a story than finished works.An uneven collection from a gifted writer.

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Starred review from December 15, 2018
In the final short story in this compelling collection, a devoted fan writes to an author, You understood that the West's image of ?the Muslim woman' was a reduced, simplified clich�. Aboulela's (The Kindness of Enemies, 2016) tales emphatically shatter any such stereotype, forcefully reminding us of the layered lives behind ethnic and religious identities. Roaming between Sudan and Scotland, with stops in Cairo and Abu Dhabi, this book offers an atypical lens on Muslim identity while exploring themes of displacement, homesickness, and fulfillment. Avoiding an overtly political tone, Aboulela nonetheless sets out to challenge preconceptions and the uneasy intersection of the West with the rest of the world. She captures details with passionate focus, whether she is describing a crowded apartment in Majed, or the Khartoum traffic in Souvenirs as Yassir picks up paintings to take home to his Scottish wife. Connected by a consistent authenticity, these stories display a virtuosity in building on the most relatable emotional hooks: prewedding nerves, pregnancy stress, or economic anxiety. Aboulela's remarkable collection offers a strong and sympathetic illumination of the social and spiritual price that migration demands even when it does deliver on an economic promise.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2019

This collection by award-winning Sudanese author Aboulela offers 13 stories united by themes of loneliness and homesickness. With settings ranging from Khartoum to London to Aberdeen, these tales explore multilayered tensions originating in religious, gender, cultural, and class differences. "The Museum," for instance, recalls the first date between a smart working-class Scottish boy who has been helping a young Sudanese classmate master their shared graduate coursework. Like "The Museum," which won Aboulela the first Caine Prize for African writing, other stories illuminate the challenges that can beset mixed-race couples. Not the least is the inability to appreciate one's own biases or to understand fully a partner's experience as other. In "Something Old, Something New," a white Muslim convert visits Khartoum for the first time to meet his beloved's family and discovers that "her country disturbed him." In "Souvenirs," the Scottish wife of a Sudanese man refuses to visit Khartoum with him but asks that he bring home an exotic gift upon his return to Edinburgh. VERDICT Aboulela succeeds because her characters are neither neatly defined nor one-dimensional, though the milieus can become repetitive. Several stories were included in 2001's Coloured Lights, and most have been published elsewhere, which recommends this collection especially for libraries that have not already discovered this accomplished author. [See Prepub Alert, 8/20/18.]--Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis

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