![]() ![]() At the University of Khartoum, Najwa meets Anwar, a prickly left-wing student revolutionary. The rest of Sudan may be in a shambles, but Najwa and her kin might as well be living inside an egg, waited on hand and foot by servants, passing long afternoons at the country club pool, going on annual shopping trips to London. They have been sheltered by extreme wealth and great good fortune. ![]() Nothing particularly bad has happened to them. Najwa and her mother dress in revealing Western styles. He's lazy, apathetic, has begun to drink and may be dabbling in drugs, but he's young. But Omar, Najwa's twin, is a bit of a backslider. They are happy, as far as any family is happy. ![]() Her father, an unabashed social-climbing workaholic, jokes that he married his wife for her money and toils long hours in the government. Her mother is materialistic (she comes from very old money) but kind. She's beautiful, raised in the Western way, a knowledgeable listener of pop tunes, a steadfast drinker of Coke. She is cheery and heedless, trapped in the seemingly benign circumstances of her own adolescence. Najwa, the narrator, grows up, along with her spoiled twin brother, as the daughter of one of the richest families in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. What happens to those unfortunates who must precipitously flee their countries? Leila Aboulela, an award-winning Sudanese writer who now lives in Scotland, addresses this question in the spare, strange and beautiful "Minaret." In every international upheaval, innocent bystanding people are "upheaved," so to say. ![]()
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