Elsewhere, Home

Written By Linda Malek

Elsewhere, Home by Leila Aboulela

Reviewed by Linda
📙📙📙

I enjoyed this short story collection by Leila Aboulela. I love Leila’s writing style - succinct, meaningful, authentic and above all she’s an author who knows what she’s talking about.

These are immigrant stories, between parent and child, siblings and lovers, mixed-background relationships too. Moreover, the stories made me think a lot about immigrant trauma and the generation gap between parents and 1st generation kids growing up differently or away from the motherland.
Literally speaking Leila has us covered - we alternate between Egypt, Sudan, the UK and other locations, with each protagonist exploring the connection they have with their homeland.

There’s also a sort of nostalgia and sorrow when talking about places like Egypt or Sudan that I’ve only felt from Aboulela’s work. My favourites were Farida’s Eyes, a schoolgirl whose parents’ reluctance and ignorance to buy her glasses causes a whole load of rife and Pages of Fruit, a woman who explores her identity and heritage through an author whose work she admires.

Short stories aren’t my personal go-to, but I’d recommend this one.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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