Season of Migration to the North

Season of Migration to the North is a novel by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, published in Arabic in 1966, narrated by an unnamed young Sudanese man who returns to his home village on the Nile after years of study in England and encounters Mustafa Sa'eed, an enigmatic older villager with a hidden past. The narrator gradually uncovers Mustafa's own earlier life in London, where his intellectual brilliance and seductive charm led to a series of destructive relationships with English women, several of which ended in death or suicide and in Mustafa's own imprisonment for killing his English wife, before Mustafa returned to Sudan and vanished, presumed drowned in the Nile. Structured as a mirror between the narrator's own uneasy return to Sudanese village life and Mustafa's earlier migration to and destruction in the colonial metropole, the novel inverts the colonial narrative of the European traveler in Africa. Widely regarded as a landmark of modern Arabic fiction, the novel was named the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century by a 2001 panel of Arab writers and critics and has been translated into more than twenty languages.