North of Dawn (2018) by Nuruddin Farah

Somali diaspora Nuruddin Farah

Book Review

North of Dawn (2018)

by Nuruddin Farah

   I usually think about Somali author Nuruddin Farah once a year right before the Nobel Prize in Literature is handed out, Farah being oft-cited year after year as a potential winner of the prize.  He came pretty close this year, losing out to Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian-British writer who has a similar profile in terms of writing from a position of self-imposed exile in the West.  Gurnah, a professor in the UK, Farah presently working as a professor in the Minnesota. 

   Anyway, I loved North of Dawn, about the life of a Somali diplomat living in Norway after the Somalian collapse, and his wife, and the wife and children of their deceased son, a jihadi who blew himself up on behalf of Al Shabab.   I was genuinely excited to find that an Audiobook had been commissioned by the publisher- Farah's only available Audiobook despite decades of novels. 

  

   The book is about the diplomat's wife honoring a promise to her dead son, that she would look after his wife, a refugee camp party girl turned observant Muslim with two teenage stepchildren.  Those expecting a plot that revolves around some kind of race based injustice have come to the wrong place, the Norwegians as portrayed by Farah are scrupulously fair and I wouldn't characterize any part of the plot as concerning injustice suffered by immigrants at the hands of their host.   True, one of the minor children is murdered in the book version the Anders Breivik youth camp massacre in 2011, but she is the only Somali victim among the 75 people killed that day.

   I would gladly read another Farah book, and it is too bad he doesn't have more Audiobooks available.