{"product_id":"season-of-migration-to-the-north-isbn-9781590173022","title":"Season of Migration to the North","description":"After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of \u003ci\u003eSeason of Migration to the North\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eSeason of Migration to the North\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cp\u003e“This depthless, elusive classic …explores not just the corrosive psychological colonisation observed by Frantz Fanon, but a more complex two-way orientalism, in which the charms of western thought, embodied in its poetry and liberal ideals, prove irresistible, even as the novel’s Sudanese narrators understand these as the tempting fruit of a poisoned tree.” —Greg Jackson, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eSeason of Migration to the North\u003c\/i\u003e is an engaging and complicated novel, by turns  combative and wistful, about two men who leave Sudan to study in England and afterward  belong in neither place.\" --Maude Newton, NPR.com\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eSeason of Migration to the North\u003c\/i\u003e is remarkably compact, really a novella rather than a novel. But woven into the brief  text is a dense tracery of allusions to Arabic and European fiction, Islamic history,  Shakespeare, Freud, and classical Arabic poetry—a corpus that haunts all his writing.  Salih, who died this past February in London, packed an entire library into this  slim masterpiece. It is literature to the second degree. And yet it is anything but  labored. Rather, it is alive with drama and incident: crimes of passion, sadomasochism,  suicide. It is a novel of ideas wrapped in the veils of romance.\" --\u003ci\u003eHarper's Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"This is the one novel that everyone insisted I took with me. Set in a Sudanese  village by the Nile, it is a brilliant exploration of African encounters with the  West, and the corrupting power of colonialism. The narrator is a man returned to  his native village, after university in England, and he gradually unpicks the horrifying  story of a newcomer he finds in his old home. This man had been a brilliant Sudanese  student and had also gone to England with terrible consequences. I never got this  book out to read without someone coming up to tell me how brilliant it was.\" --Mary  Beard\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih, is an eloquent and restrained  portrait of one man’s exile. It is a rare narrative in that it charts a life divided  between England and Sudan. Without a doubt it is one of the finest Arabic novels  of the 20th century, and Denys Johnson-Davies' translation…does the original justice.”  –Hisham Matar\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Emerging from a constantly evolving narrative, in a trance-like telling,  is the clash between an assumed worldly sophistication and enduring, dark, elemental  forces. An arresting work by a major Arab novelist who mines the rich lode of African  experience with the Western world. An arresting work by a major Arab novelist who  mines the rich lode of African experience with the Western world.\" –Publishers Weekly\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"A beautifully constructed novel by an author whose reputation in Arabic is deservedly  vast.\" –London Tribune\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"It is certainly time that [Salih] be better known in America.\"  –The Christian Science Monitor\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“An Arabian Nights in reverse, enclosing a pithy  moral about international misconceptions and delusions...Powerfully and poetically  written and splendidly translated by Denys Johnson-Davies.” –The Observer (London)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, a Sudanese novelist, and one of  the most important Arabic-language novelists. It's the story of a man who has studied  abroad and returned to life in Sudan–about the sort of cultural conflict and internal  conflict from colonization. It's a very short novel and a number of people had recommended  it to me based on what I had written. The subject matter is interesting: the story  of this crisis of someone returning from life in the West.\" –The Christian Science  Monitor\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"This book was given to me some time ago by a librarian who had to replace  her fiction shelves with an information centre. I was completely captivated by the  story...the writing is extraordinarily hypnotic. First published in Arabic in 1966,  and in English in 1969 by Heinemann's African Writers Series, it was much acclaimed  but did not gain as wide a readership in English as it deserved.\" –The Guardian\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Inevitably, Aboulela has been compared to Tayeb Salih, whose brutal novel Season  of Migration to the North is considered a classic among postcolonial texts and covers  the same geographical distance as Minaret (Salih's fiction has been widely translated  from Arabic; Aboulela writes in English.)\" –The Daily Star (Beirut)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"The prose,  translated from Arabic, has a grave beauty. It's the story of a man who returns to  his native Sudan after being educated in England, then encounters the first Sudanese  to get an English education. The near-formal elegance in the writing contrasts with  the sly anti-colonial world view of the book, and this makes it even more interesting.\"  –Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Purple Hibiscus\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"In this extraordinary 1966  novel, a young man returns to his Sudanese village after studying abroad...Salih's  own distinguished career with Unesco only sharpens this nightmare of a cultural singularity  that twists into a lie. His sweet foreword remarks that he never made much money  from fiction, so this reissue is doubly welcome.\" –The Guardian\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"The Sudanese classic  novel Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih's inversion of Conrad's journey  into Africa.\" –The Guardian\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Though Salih's work is deeply rooted in local culture,  Johnson-Davies says it has a universal appeal: ‘He writes in the main about simple  peasant people living in a village on the Nile, but they are individuals with very  much the same preoccupations as anyone else. I recollect a scene where several of  the characters boast about the merits of the donkeys they are riding, as though one  was driving a Porsche, another a Maserati, and so on!’” –The New Yorker\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"The meeting  of the East and the West as a narrative of romance is not new territory: E.M. Forster,  and lesser lights like M.M. Kaye and Paul Scott, have also presented the colonial  encounter as a romance, at times failed, at other times forced. More important, writers  from the other side of the colonial divide have come to prominence in recent decades  through their own, perhaps more contested, portrayals. Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration  to the North was an early classic of this genre.\" –The Nation\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Tayib Salih's Season  of Migration to the North is a clever inversion of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness:  for in this case an Arab worker leaves his people and goes to Europe in search of  employment, finding in the process that he has indeed entered his own heart of darkness.\"  –The Irish Times\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"This story might seem like a village tragedy from the Sudan,  the homeland of the writer Tayeb Salih, but its resonances carry far beyond the setting.  Season of Migration to the North is a brilliant miniature of the plight of Arabs  and Africans who find themselves no longer sustained by their past and not yet incorporated  into a viable future. Swift and astonishing in its prose, this novel is more instructive  than any number of academic books.\" –The New York Times\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A modern Arabic classic.”  –Reuters\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Denys Johnson-Davies...the leading Arabic-English translator of our time.”  –Edward Said, The Independent\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Davies has done more than anybody to translate modern  Arabic fiction into English and promote it.” –Nagib Mahfouz\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTayeb Salih (1929-2009) was born in northern Sudan in 1929 and educated at the University  of Khartoum. After a brief period working as a teacher, he moved to London to work  with the BBC Arabic Service. Salih later worked as director general of information  in Qatar in the Arabian Gulf, and then with unesco in Paris and the Arab Gulf States.  Along with \u003ci\u003eSeason of Migration to the Nort\u003c\/i\u003eh, his books in English include \u003ci\u003eThe Wedding  of Zein \u003c\/i\u003e(which will be published as an\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNYRB Classic) and \u003ci\u003eBandarshah\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLaila Lalami  was born and raised in Morocco. Her work has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe, The Los  Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e and elsewhere.  Her debut collection of short stories, \u003ci\u003eHope and Other Dangerous Pursuits\u003c\/i\u003e, was published  in the fall of 2005, and her first novel, \u003ci\u003eSecret Son\u003c\/i\u003e, was published in the spring  of 2009. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University  of California Riverside.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eDenys Johnson-Davies\u003c\/b\u003e(1922-2017)published more than twenty-five  volumes of stories, novels, plays, and poetry translated from modern Arabic literature.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300421030117,"sku":"NP9781590173022","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590173022.jpg?v=1767736247","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/season-of-migration-to-the-north-isbn-9781590173022","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}