Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Leila Aboulela on autobiographical elements in Minaret: In both my parents’ lives, modernity and tradition existed side by sidein my father’s case his liberal education and his loyalty to his family, in my mother’s case her devotion to Islam and her career in the UN.

To order a copy for £7.64 go to or call 03. There is so much quiet brilliance to this story and others that it is a surprise for those who have only followed Aboulela’s long-form fiction to discover she has just as much mastery of the short form.Įlsewhere, Home by Leila Aboulela is published by Telegram (£8.99). Aboulela builds up the emotional drama here with such mastery that the rebuff feels like a tragedy, though the housewife’s life is outwardly unchanged. She saves up for a trip to the Edinburgh book festival in the hope of meeting her, sure that they will feel a sisterly affinity, but is harshly rejected. Pages of Fruit features a traditional housewife who becomes an ardent fan of a Muslim novelist she has never met, but whom she regards as an iconoclast. Fissures occur between Muslim couples too: a desperately homesick wife who leaves Sudan to be with her husband in London is told by him: “If you cover your hair in London they’ll think I’m forcing you to do that.” Remembering the freer woman she was, she thinks: “So I must walk unclothed, imagining cotton on my hair, lifting my hand to adjust an imaginary tobe.” Mixed-race couples emerge time and again but there is rarely a happy fusion of cultural identities. Being driven from the airport to his hotel, he thinks: “Any one of these passersby could easily punch him through the window, yank off his watch, his sunglasses, snatch his wallet from the pocket of his shirt.” Once there, his desire for her becomes entangled with his suspicions of the “foreigners” in whose land he now feels stranded. Something Old, Something New is told from the perspective of a white Muslim convert from Edinburgh, visiting his Sudanese fiancee in Khartoum for the first time. Occasionally she gets inside the minds of men too. The moment captures what it means to be one of Aboulela’s Muslim women in the west visibly different, culturally marooned and craving an emotional connection.

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