"Nuruddin Farah is one of the real interpreters of experience in our troubled continent. His insight goes deep, beyond events." Nadine Gordimer Winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Nuruddin Farah is one of Africa's most respected contemporary writers. Maps is the first novel in his acclaimed Blood in the Sun trilogy, set in his native land. Askar lost his father in the bloody war between Ethiopia and Somalia, and his mother died giving birth to him. Taken in by Misra, a kindhearted woman, he grows up in a small village. But as an adolescent, a true child of his times, he begins to feel suffocated there and goes to live with his cosmopolitan aunt and uncle in the capital. In dangerous and turbulent Mogadiscio, Somalis are struggling to recreate a national identity that has been destroyed by the upheavals of modernity and the betrayals of civil war. Askar throws himself into radical political activity in the midst of the turmoil. As allegations of murder and treason are leveled at Misra, Askar's personal sense identity and Somalia's political boundaries will be challenged with a ferocity he could have never imagined. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

"Nuruddin Farah is one of the finest contemporary African novelists." Salman Rushdie The second novel in Nuruddin Farah's Blood in the Sun trilogy, Gifts is the beguiling tale of a Somali family and the struggles of its powerful matriarch to keep it whole. Duniya is a single mother, raising twins while working as a nurse in a Mogadiscio hospital. Her self-sufficient world is rocked when her rebellious daughter brings home a mysterious foundling infant. And when Duniya accepts a ride to work from a wealthy, romantically interested family friend, her whole life is turned upside down. Meanwhile, the hospital where she works is besieged by a desperate population ravaged by war, drought, disease, and famine. Western relief agencies have invaded Somalia with their charity, and some Somalis chafe at tainted goods and the burden of debts they can never hope to repay. With lyrical, luxuriant prose, Farah weaves a spellbinding tapestry of reportage, dreams, memory, folktales, and family lore. In his hands, Duniya's tale becomes emblematic of the struggles of an entire people. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

The eponymous first part of mclennan's new book consists of fifty "gifts" each centred around words, phrases, or "glyphs" of language that initiate and replicate their own fractal transformations: some remain simply found fragments about which other words and phrases unfold, some lose themselves into pieces that we forget were once found, some mirror themselves in other forms, others become simply something other in language as it moves both with and away from them, each creating a syntax of meaning that is specific to its own occasion. All are addressed to the poet's intimates--two dozen are, significantly, valentines--the rest admonitions, remembrances, messages and homages made public by the readers' acts of witness.
In part two, "incomplete," we are invited to watch the poet robbed of his intent as unexpected words interrupt his texts, turning declaratives into interrogatives, questions into requests: "would you leave (accidental) behind"--each poem an apparent loop of closure, but one that signifies its "failure" or incompletion by ending, or starting over again, with its first title] word. In part three, "weightless," the poet frees the signifier from the weight of the signified. He brackets and strikes through what we think of as "known" in the "real world" that is always outside language, because it is named].
What unifies or makes these four parts into a book are the personae the poet assigns to the lover: in the first as an intimate; in the second as an interruption of the determinative self--the other that brings us back to the self; in the third as an undefinable and thereby unattainable weightlessness; and finally as the gravitational pull of the landscape itself--all of them "unfinished" at the speaker's age, as the title of part four implies: " sex at thirty-eight] unfinished shield notes: letters to g."

One of the first literary works to portray Djiboutians from their own point of view, "The Land without Shadows" is a collection of seventeen short stories. The author, Abdourahman A. Waberi, one of a handful of francophone writers of fiction to have emerged in the twentieth century from the "confetti-sized state" of Djibouti, has already won international recognition and prizes in African literature for his stories and novel. Because his writing is linked to immigration and exile, his native Djibouti occupies center stage in his work. Drawing on the Somali/Djiboutian oral tradition to weave pieces of legend, proverbs, music, poetry, and history together with references to writers as diverse as Soyinka, Shakespeare, Djebar, Baudelaire, Cesaire, Waugh, Senghor, and Beckett, Waberi succeeds in bringing his country into a context that reaches well beyond the Horn of Africa.

Originally published in France in 1994 as "Le Pays sans ombre, " this newly translated collection presents stories about the precolonial and colonial past of Djibouti alongside those set in the postcolonial era. With irony and humor, these short stories portray madmen, poets, artists, French colonists, pseudointellectuals, young women, aspiring politicians, famished refugees, khat chewers, nomads struggling to survive in Djibouti's ruthless natural environment, or tramps living (and dying) in Balbala, the shantytown that stretches to the south of the capital. Waberi's complex web of allusions locates his tales at an intersection between history and ethnography, politics and literature. While written in a narrative prose, these stories nevertheless call on an indigenous literary tradition that elevates poetry to the highest standing.

By juxtaposing the present with the past, the individual with the collective, the colonized with the colonizer, the local with the global, "The Land without Shadows" composes an image of Djibouti that is at times both kaleidoscopic and cinematographic. Here the art of the short story offers partial but brilliantly illuminated scenes of the Djiboutian urban and rural landscape, its people, and its history.

For sale in the U.S. and its territories only

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 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").

Published for the first time in the U. S.ainternationally celebrated writer Nuruddin Farahas first novel
Written with complete conviction from a womanas point of view, Nuruddin Farahas 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 asold like cattle.a BACKCOVER: aNuruddin Farah, the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years, is also one of the most sophisticated voices in modern fiction.a
a"The New York Review of Books"
aItas easy to see why Nuruddin Farahas name keeps coming up as a likely recipient of a Nobel Prize in Literature.a
a"Newsweek"

A gripping new novel from today's "most important African novelist" ("The New York Times Book Review")

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.

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 tripahis 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 motheras grave, Jeebleh is asked to investigate the abduction of the young daughter of one of his closest friendas 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.

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.