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 to a terrible public reckoning and his return
to his native land.
But what is the
meaning of Mustafa's shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without
explanation, leaving the young man--whom he has asked to look after
his wife--in an unsettled and violent no-man's-land between Europe
and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and
man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.
Season of
Migration to the North is a rich and sensual work of deep honesty
and incandescent lyricism. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab
writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth
century.