Published for the first time in the U. S.—internationally celebrated writer Nuruddin Farah’s first novel

Written with complete conviction from a woman’s point of view, Nuruddin Farah’s spare, shocking first novel savagely attacks the traditional values of his people yet is also a haunting celebration of the unbroken human spirit. Ebla, an orphan of eighteen, runs away from her nomadic encampment in rural Somalia when she discovers that her grandfather has promised her in marriage to an older man. But even after her escape to Mogadishu, she finds herself as powerless and dependent on men as she was out in the bush. As she is propelled through servitude, marriage, poverty, and violence, Ebla has to fight to retain her identity in a world where women are “sold like cattle.” BACKCOVER: “Nuruddin Farah, the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years, is also one of the most sophisticated voices in modern fiction.”
—The New York Review of Books

“It’s easy to see why Nuruddin Farah’s name keeps coming up as a likely recipient of a Nobel Prize in Literature.”
—Newsweek