Sudanese-American Writer Fatin Abbas Is Bringing Ghost Season to the UK This June

Source: brittlepaper.com
Fatin Abbas is a Sudanese-American fiction writer, cultural essayist, and academic, born in Khartoum and educated at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University, and the City University of New York. This June, she arrives in the United Kingdom for a five-stop book tour celebrating the paperback release of Ghost Season, her debut novel published by Jacaranda Books. The tour runs from June 20 to June 27 and takes in Brighton, Sevenoaks, and three London events including stops at SOAS, the Africa Centre, and the Hammersmith & Fulham Writers Festival.

Ghost Season is set in Saraaya, a remote border town between northern and southern Sudan, where five strangers on an NGO compound, a South Sudanese translator, a northern nomad cook, a Sudanese-American filmmaker, a twelve-year-old boy working to support his family, and a white midwestern aid worker, find their lives upended when a mysterious burnt corpse is discovered one morning, foreshadowing the civil war closing in around them. Abbas has described the novel as an attempt to make sense of her place of origins, as a diasporic Sudanese who has always felt connected to what is now two countries — Sudan and South Sudan. The book was included in Brittle Paper’s 100 Notable Books of 2023.

The praise that followed the novel’s publication was extraordinary. Maaza Mengiste, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Shadow King, called it utterly mesmerizing and a brilliant depiction of the blurry psychological and physical borders that divide Sudan and South Sudan. Dave Eggers described it as immersive and astonishing, bringing alive with brilliant specificity the border town of Saraaya and an unforgettable cast of characters linked by circumstance and fate. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, author of House of Stone, wrote that the novel travels that narrow road between austere and gut-wrenching with incomparable grace, and that Abbas is a writer of prodigious powers.