In the fall of 2011, Riverhead will publish Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah‘s Crossbones, the final book in a trilogy including Links and Knots. BookPage reviewed Links in 2004, praising Farah’s skillful writing: “erudite, analytical, with a talent for arresting analogies… anyone wishing to understand this struggle between failed states and those rather more successful would do well to read, and heed, this timely and gripping book.”
Sounds like Crossbones will be no less timely (according to the New York Times, Somali pirates have held more than 25 foreign ships and 500 people hostage in November). Here’s a plot description from Publishers Marketplace:
a Somali expatriate returns to discover that his homeland, which he’d last seen through the crossfire of battling warlords, is now in the grip of pirates, white-robed religious extremists bearing whips, and child-soldiers doing their bidding as an Ethiopian invasion looms
Many regard Farah as the best African novelist writing today. Will you look for Crossbones?
