She still has ways of keeping the old country alive. Sitting down in the place next door, I notice she’s carrying a musical instrument. “I’m learning how to play the oud,” she tells me, a traditional instrument similar to a lute. “I’m being taught by an 85-year-old who has been playing since he was 17.” She met him by chance on a plane and they became friends. “He’s very cool,” she says, adding, “he’s got some stories to tell. He’s a bit like my father.”
Her father’s stories were the basis of Mohamed’s award-winning first novel Black Mamba Boy (2009), which followed a child's journey across the Middle East and Africa in the Thirties and Forties. She interviewed her father extensively, an experience she describes as “very collaborative, quite joyful”. Initially she had wanted to write a biography rather than a novel, but found that the freedom of fiction enabled her to “disappear into someone’s mind, someone’s spirit” – which is much harder to do, she says, if you have to stick to the facts.
Ahead of the publication of her new novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, Mohamed was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. She is disarmingly honest about how much the accolade means to her. “This book was hard, so hard that I really didn’t know if I had a future as a writer any more. So the Granta nomination was a boost – was an act of faith in me and my writing.”
Part of her difficulty with The Orchard of Lost Souls was the harrowing nature of the material. The novel begins in Mohamed's home city of Hargeisa in 1987, on the cusp of the Somali civil war. It charts the intersecting fate of three female characters. Kawsar, a middle-aged widow, sees Deqo, a nine-year-old girl, being attacked at a government parade. She steps in to defend her but Filsan, a female soldier, arrests her. These are the lost souls who, must find themselves. The story is brutal but compelling – leavened with the poetic language that characterised Mohamed’s first book.
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