October 29, 2012, Monday - Nuruddin Farah Reading at The Loft

Tme: 7:00pm

Location: The Loft, Performance Hall, 1011 Washington Avenue South

The Loft and the University of Minnesota's Department of English proudly present a reading by Nuruddin Farah for the paperback release of his novel Crossbones.

About the book:

A gripping new novel from today's "most important African novelist" (The New York Times Review of Books). 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. 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, appartently 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 teh 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.

About the author:

Born in 1945 in Baidoa, Somalia, Nuruddin Farah is the author of ten novels, a nonfiction book, and numerous articles and stories in English. His worked has been translated into more than 20 languages. Long before the collapse of Somalia's government, he was pushed into exile by the dictator Siyad Barre, and has lived, taught, and written in many African countries. He currently resides in Cape Town, South Africa. Because his first novel, Sweet and Sour Milk, concerns the plight of a young Somali woman forced into an arranged marriage, and because his work traces relations between dictatorship at the national scale and patriarchal tyranny at the family scale, he has been celebrated as a "feminist" African writer. Having dealt with dictatorship, breakdown, and exile in earlier works, Farah has begun in this trilogy to imagine possible modes of a return to Somalia.