Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies
With a new introduction by Tayeb Salih

‘An Arabian Nights in reverse … Powerfully and poetically written’ 
Observer

When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger – the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the disturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven to take brutal revenge on the decadent West and was, in turn, destroyed by it. Now the terrible legacy of his actions has come to haunt the small village at the bend of the Nile.

The story of a man undone by a culture that in part created him, Season of Migration to the North is a powerful and evocative examination of colonization in two vastly different worlds.

The writer and politician Mahmud al-Mis'adi is a figure of prime importance in the development of North African literature and cultural politics since the last war. This fascinating book covers both his essays and fiction, written between the 1930s and 1990s, which challenge the boundaries between the sacred and irreligious in the Islamic world. In addition, it also examines Arabic literature and its relationship to the West.

The writer and politician Mahmud al-Misa (TM)adi is a figure of prime importance in the development of North African literature and cultural politics since the last war. This fascinating book covers both his essays and fiction, written between the 1930s and 1990s, which challenge the boundaries between the sacred and irreligious in the Islamic world. In addition, it also examines Arabic literature and its relationship to the West.

"The Wedding of Zein "takes place in the same village on the upper Nile where Tayeb Salih's "Season of Migration to the North "is largely set, but here the story that emerges through the overlapping, sometimes contradictory voices of the villagers is comic and redemptive rather than tragic. Everyone in the village is dumbfounded when the news goes around that Zein is getting married--Zein the freak, Zein who no sooner than he was born burst into laughter and has kept women and children laughing ever since, Zein who lost all his teeth at six and whose face is completely hairless, Zein who never wears shoes and does not trim his nails. Zein married at last? Zein's role in the village is not to get married himself but to fall in love with girls who then marry someone else. The story of how this miracle came to be is a story that engages the tensions that exist in the village, or indeed in any community--tensions between the devout and the profane, the poor and the propertied, the modern and the traditional--and as it plays out in Salih's agile hands it reveals a prospect, absurd and yet wonderful and certainly wonderfully entertaining, of their ultimate reconciliation--a mythical, utopian vision from the deep past or the ideal future of the world made whole.
Salih's classic novella appears with two of his finest short stories, "The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid" and "A Handful of Dates."

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.