Farah giving a talk about his book Sweet and Sour Milk on November 2, 2010, at South High School in Minneapolis. Credit: Katie Jerome

Nuruddin Farah was born November 24th 1945 in Baidoa, in what is now the Republic of Somalia.  Farah is the author of several novels, including From a Crooked Rib, Links and his Blood in the Sun trilogy: Maps, Gifts, and Secrets. His novels have been translated into seventeen languages and have won numerous awards.

In 1991, he received the Swedish Tucholsky Literary Award, given to literary exiles, and he was the recipient of the German DAAD fellowship in 1990.  Farah was named the 1998 laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, "widely regarded as the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel" (The New York Times). Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he now lives in Cape Town, South Africa, with his wife and their children

Nuruddin Farah interview at the Commonwealth Club of California, 2007.
 

 

Crossbones
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Reading level: Ages 18 and up
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (September 1, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1594488169
ISBN-13: 978-1594488160
Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.4 x 9.3 inches

A 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominated Book

“A gripping new novel from today's "most important African novelist”. —The New York Times Review of Books

A dozen years after his last visit, Jeebleh returns to his beloved Mogadiscio to see old friends. He is accompanied by his son-in-law, Malik, a journalist intent on covering the region's ongoing turmoil. What greets them at first is not the chaos Jeebleh remembers, however, but an eerie calm enforced by ubiquitous white-robed figures bearing whips.

Meanwhile, Malik's brother, Ahl, has arrived in Puntland, the region notorious as a pirates' base. Ahl is searching for his stepson, Taxliil, who has vanished from Minneapolis, apparently recruited by an imam allied to Somalia's rising religious insurgency. The brothers' efforts draw them closer to Taxliil and deeper into the fabric of the country, even as Somalis brace themselves for an Ethiopian invasion. Jeebleh leaves Mogadiscio only a few hours before the borders are breached and raids descend from land and sea. As the uneasy quiet shatters and the city turns into a battle zone, the brothers experience firsthand the derailments of war.

Completing the trilogy that began with Links and Knots, Crossbones is a fascinating look at individuals caught in the maw of zealotry, profiteering, and political conflict, by one of our most highly acclaimed international writers.

Nuruddin Farah. Excerpt from Crossbones. 2011
 

 

Knots
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Reading level: Ages 18 and up
Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books (March 25, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143112988
ISBN-13: 978-0143112983
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches

Nominated for a 2008 Essence Literary Award

From the internationally revered author of Links comes "a beautiful, hopeful novel about one woman's return to war-ravaged Mogadishu" (Time)

Called "one of the most sophisticated voices in modern fiction" (The New York Review of Books), Nuruddin Farah is widely recognized as a literary genius. He proves it yet again with Knots, the story of a woman who returns to her roots and discovers much more than herself. Born in Somalia but raised in North America, Cambara flees a failed marriage by traveling to Mogadishu. And there, amid the devastation and brutality, she finds that her most unlikely ambitions begin to seem possible. Conjuring the unforgettable extremes of a fractured Muslim culture and the wayward Somali state through the eyes of a strong, compelling heroine, Knots is another Farah masterwork.

 

Sweet and Sour Milk (Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship)
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Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press (August 22, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1555971598
ISBN-13: 978-1555971595
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches

Winner of the 1980 English-Speaking Union Literary Award

The first novel in Farah's universally acclaimed Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk chronicles one man's search for the reasons behind his twin brother's violent death during the 1970s. The atmosphere of political tyranny and repression reduces our hero's quest to a passive and fatalistic level; his search for reasons and answers ultimately becomes a search for meaning. The often detective-story-like narrative of this novel thus moves on a primarily interior plane as

"Farah takes us deep into territory he has charted and mapped and made uniquely his own" (Chinua Achebe).

 

Sardines: A Novel (Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship)
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Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press (August 22, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 155597161X
ISBN-13: 978-1555971618
Product Dimensions: 53.9 x 0.8 x 84.6 inches

Winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature

Farah's landmark Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy is comprised by the novels Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines, and Close Sesame. In this volume, the second of the three, a woman loses her job as editor of the national newspaper and then finds her efforts to instill her daughter with a sense of dignity and independence threatened by an oppressive government and the traditions of conservative Islam.

Sardines brilliantly combines a social commentary on life under a dictatorship with a compassionate exploration of African feminist issues.

 

Close Sesame (Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship)
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Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press (August 22, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1555971628
ISBN-13: 978-1555971625
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches

Farah's landmarkVariations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy is comprised by the novels Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines, and Close Sesame. In this volume, the third and final book in the series, the characters are deeply entwined in the waking nightmare of a police state. An old man finds himself poised in mortal combat with an elusive and cunning enemy in an atmosphere where the distinction between public and private justice is always obscured.

Close Sesame is a novel that offers "an eloquent indictment of the tyrannies committed both under Islamic law and in the name of Socialism" (The Observer).

 

From a Crooked Rib
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Reading level: Ages 18 and up
Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books (June 27, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143037269
ISBN-13: 978-0143037262
Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches

Written with complete conviction from a woman's point of view, Nuruddin Farah's spare, shocking first novel savagely attacks the traditional values of his people yet is also a haunting celebration of the unbroken human spirit. Ebla, an orphan of eighteen, runs away from her nomadic encampment in rural Somalia when she discovers that her grandfather has promised her in marriage to an older man. But even after her escape to Mogadishu, she finds herself as powerless and dependent on men as she was out in the bush. As she is propelled through servitude, marriage, poverty, and violence, Ebla has to fight to retain her identity in a world where women are "sold like cattle."

 

Links
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Reading level: Ages 18 and up
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books (March 29, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143034847
ISBN-13: 978-0143034841
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches

Gripping, provocative, and revelatory, Links is a novel that will stand as a classic of modern world literature. Jeebleh is returning to Mogadiscio, Somalia, for the first time in twenty years. But this is not a nostalgia trip—his last residence there was a jail cell. And who could feel nostalgic for a city like this? U.S. troops have come and gone, and the decimated city is ruled by clan warlords and patrolled by qaat-chewing gangs who shoot civilians to relieve their adolescent boredom. Diverted in his pilgrimage to visit his mother’s grave, Jeebleh is asked to investigate the abduction of the young daughter of one of his closest friend’s family. But he learns quickly that any act in this city, particularly an act of justice, is much more complicated than he might have imagined.

 

Maps (Blood in the Sun trilogy)
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Reading level: Ages 18 and up
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books (November 1, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0140296433
ISBN-13: 978-0140296433
Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches

This first novel in Nuruddin Farah's Blood in the Sun trilogy tells the story of Askar, a man coming of age in the turmoil of modern Africa. With his father a victim of the bloody Ethiopian civil war and his mother dying the day of his birth, Askar is taken in and raised by a woman named Misra amid the scandal, gossip, and ritual of a small African village. As an adolescent, Askar goes to live in Somalia's capital, where he strives to find himself just as Somalia struggles for national identity. 

 

Gifts (Blood in the Sun trilogy)
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Reading level: Ages 18 and up
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books (November 1, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0140296425
ISBN-13: 978-0140296426
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches  

Gifts is a beguiling tale of a Somali family, its strong matriarch, Duniya, and its past wounds that refuse to heal. As the story unfolds, Somalia is ravaged by war, drought, disease, and famine, prompting industrialized nations to offer monetary aid—gifts to the so-called
Third World. Farah weaves these threads together into a tapestry of dreams, memories, family lore, folktales, and journalistic accounts.

 

Secrets (Blood in the Sun trilogy)
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Reading level: Ages 18 and up
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books (December 1, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0140280456
ISBN-13: 978-0140280456
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8.3 inches

It is the week before the outbreak of the civil war in Somalia. Kalaman, a successful young businessman in Mogadiscio receives an unexpected house guest—the wild and sexually adventurous Sholoongo, his childhood crush returned from America. She announces that she intends to have his baby. Confronted by this dangerous interruption from his past, Kalaman starts to investigate his family's history, and uncovers the startling key to his own conception. Hailed by Salman Rushdie as "one of the finest contemporary African novelists," Farah writes in a rhythmical, sensual prose reminiscent of García Márquez's best fiction. Evoking the beauty and tragedy of Africa, Secrets is a remarkable portrait of a family disintegrating like its country, its ties dissolved by exposed lies and secrets.  

 

Yesterday, Tomorrow, Voices from the Somali Diaspora
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Paperback: 198 pages
Publisher: Cassell (March 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0304707023
ISBN-13: 978-0304707027
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.7 inches

The story of the international refugees created by the political tyranny of post-colonial Somalia. The author, an established Somali novelist who went into exile as a form of protest, has interviewed Somalis in Africa and Europe to provide this portrait of how people react, are wounded, how they survive, change and even thrive when they flee their homes and are turned into refugees. It shows how the refugees see themselves and how the host countries treat refugees. It reveals how refugees have adapted, or failed to adapt, to different countries and how their lives became disrupted and recreated as a result of politics and economics. Although it focuses on a particular people, the work should help readers to understand the experiences of people forced by mass migrations to live fragmented lives in the post-modern era of rapid change.