The Orchard of Lost Souls | |
Author: | Nadifa Mohamed |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Language: | English |
Genre: | Historical novel |
Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
Release Date: | September 2013 |
Media Type: | Print (hardback) |
Pages: | 352 pp (1st hardcover edition) |
Isbn: | 9781471115295 |
Preceded By: | Black Mamba Boy |
Followed By: | The Fortune Men |
The Orchard of Lost Souls is a 2013 novel by the Somali-British author Nadifa Mohamed. It is set in Somalia on the eve of the civil war.[1] Her second book, coming four years after her award-winning debut work Black Mamba Boy (2009), it was published by Simon & Schuster.[2] [3]
Reviewing The Orchard of Lost Souls in The Independent, Arifa Akbar said: "If Mohamed's first novel was about fathers and sons ... this one is essentially about mothers and daughters."[4] Aminatta Forna wrote in The New York Times: "In both 'Black Mamba Boy' and 'The Orchard of Lost Souls,' Nadifa Mohamed — generationally at a remove from the events she describes — shows how the echo of war reverberates down the generations, and why every nation needs its storytellers: someone to, if not make sense of events, then order them so that sense may be drawn."[5] Anita Sethi's review in The Observer concluded: "This novel shows its author blossoming into her talent with her own innovative, at times pulse-quickening style, distilling startling language from loss."[6]
In 2014, The Orchard of Lost Souls won the Somerset Maugham Award and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.[7] [8]