Minaret
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
In her Muslim hijab, with her down-turned gaze, Najwa is invisible to most eyes, especially to the rich London families whose houses she cleans. But twenty years earlier it was a different story. Najwa was at university in Khartoum and, as an upper-class westernised Sudanese, her dreams were to marry well and raise a family. However, those days of innocence came to an abrupt end and tough years followed. Now Najwa finds solace in her visits to the Mosque, the companionship of the Muslims she meets there and in the hijab she adopts. Her dreams may have shattered but her awakening to Islam has given her a different peace. Then Najwa meets a younger man and slowly they begin to fall in love ...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Aboulela's U.S. debut is written in the voice of Najwa, an upper-class Sudanese woman, and covers, episodically, 20 years of her life. A Khartoum teen, Najwa flees to London with her mother and brother when the coup of 1985 leads to her father's arrest and execution. With her mother soon dead and her brother in jail on drug charges, Najwa attempts to negotiate work, love and the ways they get twisted around emigr politics and religion. An affair begun in Khartoum with devout, politically engaged, working-class fellow migr Anwar is threaded in with a later one with Tamer, the contentiously devout, college-age son of the family for which Najwa works as a nanny when in her 30s. The denouements of the two relationships, though separated by more than 10 years, come one after the other; both lead, painfully, to a deepening of Najwa's religious faith. Aboulela was raised in Khartoum and now divides her time between Dubai and Aberdeen, Scotland; a novel (The Translator) and short story collection (Colored Lights) were previously published in the U.K. Aside from some stilted dialogue, she draws Najwa's odyssey of exile, loss and found faith beautifully.
