Raph Cormack

City of Discovery
Review of the Comma Press paperback edition (2016), part of the Reading the City series.

This anthology collects 10 short stories from Sudanese writers centering around the topic of the city of Khartoum. The stories and styles have a wide variety and include humour, drama, surrealism, magic realism and historical fiction. The stories include:

1) The Tank by Ahmed al-Malik
2) In the City by Ali al-Makk
3) A Boy Playing with Dolls by Isa al-Hilu
4) It's Not Important, Your From There by Arthur Gabriel Yak
5) Next Eid by Bawadir Bashir
6) Passing by Rania Mamoun
7) The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away by Bushra al-Fadil
8) The Passage by Mamoun Eltlib
9) The Butcher's Daughter by Abdel Aziz Baraka Sakin
10) The Void by Hammour Ziada

The final story, The Void, has the largest impact as it is a mini-epic in 13 parts in only 16 pages about the defeat of Sudanese Mahdist forces by British and Egyptian forces at the Battle of Omdurman (1898).

My thanks to Comma Press who provided this book as a bonus for my Translation Fiction Online Book Club order of Thirteen Months of Sunrise.… (más)