Season of Migration to the North: Introd.by Laila Lalami (New York Review Books Classics)

But what is the meaning of Mustafa's shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man--whom he has asked to look after his wife--in an unsettled and violent no-man's-land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.

Season of Migration to the North is a rich and sensual work of deep honesty and incandescent lyricism. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century.