Travelling with Djinns

The breakout novel from a brilliant British-Sudanese novelist writing cleverly, wittily and movingly about being an outsider inside Europe.

Jamal Mahjoub was born in London and brought up in Khartoum, Sudan. Originally trained as a geologist, he has worked as a librarian, painter, chef, curator, journalist and translator, but is now a full-time writer. His four previous novels have been highly acclaimed and widely translated. He lives in Barcelona.

Yasin is driving through Europe in a dilapidated Peugeot 504 with his seven-year-old son Leo. He's not sure where they're going. He just knows he's thirty-seven years old, his wife is about to divorce him and this is his last chance to explain to his son who he is and where he comes from. The problem is that Yasin isn't sure of the answer to these questions himself. Born in the Sudan to an English mother and an Arab father, he has two passports but no national identity. As he and Leo drift through Germany to Paris in search of Europe's history, and onwards through Provence to Spain to find Yasin's ex-lover and his lost brother, Yasin reflects on the tragic-comic ironies of his displaced life and the kind of mixed-up world his son will inhabit. 'An exceptionally gifted novelist' Le Monde

Jamal Mahjoub

Impressive...Time, memory, music, architecture and identity are all played off one another, making the book a kind of echo chamber

There is a beautiful density and control to his writing -he jumps in and out of the heads of his characters with impressive confidence and ease

A fascinating novel...[Mahjoub's] combination of sharp lateral thinking, structural ingenuity and descriptive power paints a vivid picture of identities in flux

This is a study of human mutability, composed of exhilarating, life-changing moments

Mahjoub writes...originally and engagingly about place and architecture

Liverpool, 1958, and German refugee and inventor Ernst Frager is in search of a sense of belonging. What he finds is an unusual nightclub on the Mersyside docks, and Miranda: hat-check girl, aspiring jazz singer and daughter of West Indian immigrants. Their doomed love affair will have repercussions for the children waiting for Ernst back in London, but also for the daughter Miranda gives birth to. Almost half a century later, Jade finds herself grappling with the very questions that drove her father into the arms of her mother, and realising that a successful career cannot define an identity; nor can you separate your existence from all the many other stories connected to it ...<br/>
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Like the jazz that snakes its way though this beautiful novel, <i>The Drift Latitudes</i> is about how we improvise our lives and the chances we take. From the Nubian boy who flees the tedium of home to find the bright lights of New York's jazz scene, to Ernst's daughter Rachel who turns her back on Europe and follows her husband to the Sudan, it is about the movement of people around our globe and the interdependence of our dreams. Awash with memorable characters, filled with unputdownable stories, this is a brilliantly intricate novel that lingers in the mind long after its final note.

Jamal Mahjoub

Praise for The Drift Latitudes

Impressive...Time, memory, music, architecture and identity are all played off one another, making the book a kind of echo chamber

Terrific writing

There is a beautiful density and control to his writing -he jumps in and out of the heads of his characters with impressive confidence and ease

Impressive...Time, memory, music, architecture and identity are all played off one another, making the book a kind of echo chamber

Terrific writing

There is a beautiful density and control to his writing -he jumps in and out of the heads of his characters with impressive confidence and ease

Impressive...Time, memory, music, architecture and identity are all played off one another, making the book a kind of echo chamber

Terrific writing

There is a beautiful density and control to his writing -he jumps in and out of the heads of his characters with impressive confidence and ease

Books by Jamal Mahjoub

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