Francis King
Beyond The Nile
Season of Migration to the North
By Tayeb Salih (Trans Denys Johnson-Davies)
Penguin 169pp £7.99 order from our bookshop
ALTHOUGH HUNDREDS OF thousands of copies of Season oj Migration to the North have been sold throughout the Arab world, and although two years ago a panel of Arab writers and critics selected it as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century, its author's name, to say nothing of his work, is unfair to the English-speaking world at large. Now that this complex and compact masterpiece, already translated into some twenty different languages, has appeared as a Penguin Modern Classic one can only hope that this injustice will be remedied.
Salih's narrator, like Salih himself, has left his native Sudan to study in England. After a seven-year absence, he returns home to his 'small village at the bend of the Nile' and at once feels 'as though a piece of ice were melting inside me'. Soon
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553