Intimate...unflinching. Very tough to put down.

It's funny and sad and redemptive. Read it now. Thank me later.

How do we forgive the unforgivable? First-time novelist Ward explores this question with a delicate blend of compassion, humour and realism...Her spare but psychologically rich portraits are utterly convincing.

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. I never got this book out to read without someone coming up to tell me how brilliant it was

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 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

Denys Johnson-Davies...the leading Arabic-English translator of our time