The murder of a good man creates a vacuum his bereaved sister bravely tries to fill in this intimate family drama by African novelist Nuruddin Farah (Crossbones). After her brother, Aar, a U.N. ambassador in Somalia, loses his life to a terrorist bomb, fashion photographer Bella leaves her job in Italy to take over as guardian of his teenage son and daughter in Nairobi. Their mother, Valerie, left the family for another woman years ago, and with Aar dead, Bella hopes Valerie will simply leave the children in peace.
However, as Bella makes progress on forming a new family with suspicious Salif and fragile Dahaba, Valerie resurfaces with her lover, Padmini, fresh off a stint in a Ugandan jail after an unscrupulous businessman exposed them as a couple.
From the first moments of the story--the only segment told from Aar's point of view--Farah establishes Bella as smart, socially savvy and never strident, a free spirit who is also focused on her career, her brother and his children. By contrast, Valerie is clearly a poor choice of guardian for the children: impractical, catty and erratic. And though she's the source of much conflict, readers should not assume that Farah makes judgments against the LGBT community in general. Rather, he draws attention to their plight--homosexuality is a crime in many African countries and can even carry the death penalty.
Gracefully pulling together social issues with the seismography of a single family and underscoring it all with hints at the Somali diaspora of the 1990s, Farah once again offers a complex look at the struggle and joy of finding home. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads