Maps

Askar is found beside his dead mother in the Ogaden and raised by Misra, a woman from the Ethiopian highlands who is not related to him and whose people are on the other side of the war. As he grows into a Somali nationalist, the question of what he owes her becomes inseparable from the question of what a nation is owed. Farah wrote it as the first volume of his Blood in the Sun trilogy, and it uses second-person narration to keep the reader uncertain who is speaking.