It’s rare for a novel from Sudan, let alone one written in English and published by a UK press, to arrive in Britain with anything like a marketing push, let alone a “buzz”. But A Mouth Full of Salt, the debut novel by Reem Gaafar, published by Saqi, arrives cloaked in just that. It won the Island Prize in 2023, with Gaafar becoming the first Sudanese novelist to do so, and lands with the quiet force of a work that knows exactly what it’s doing. That such attention exists is telling. There’s now a market for certain kinds of “global literature”: textured but legible, political but personal, exotic but not too remote. This novel exceeds that frame.
Gaafar, a Sudanese writer, physician and filmmaker now based in Canada, has published short fiction in African Arguments, Teakisi and elsewhere. This is her first novel, though it hardly reads like one. Set in a village on the banks of the Nile during a slow-building crisis, a drowned child, livestock dying en masse, the unspoken churn of political decay, it is less concerned with plot than with structure and atmosphere. Gaafar’s grip on both is firm, her prose clean, her vision precise.
At its centre is Fatima, a teenage girl caught between categories: not yet married, not quite a child, observant, caustic, and largely ignored. Her voice is cool and ironic. She watches the men search for the body, watches the women prepare for mourning, watches her own in-laws perform their disdain for a mother whose only son has just disappeared. Fatima isn’t seeking liberation. She’s taking notes.
“The river brought them life. But the river was not their friend.”
The temptation is to read the river as metaphor, time, memory, the unconscious, but Gaafar resists metaphor. The Nile in this novel is not symbolic. It is a structure, a material force: it irrigates, drowns, conceals, deposits. It demands social ritual—search parties, burial customs, whispered superstitions—but offers no guarantees. In that sense, it mirrors the state: omnipresent and indifferent. The novel quietly stages a kind of rural necropolitics, asking who gets mourned, who gets buried, and who is left to rot.
What’s most distinctive is the way Gaafar renders the political not through argument but through ambience. There are no direct polemics. Instead, a radio crackles about bread shortages and national unity. Gossip about witchcraft collides with official silence. Civil war in the south is mentioned only in passing, but its effects are everywhere: in the failing infrastructure, the paralysed economy, the atmosphere of quiet desperation. Politics doesn’t announce itself, it’s in the water, in the soil, in the goats that drop dead overnight.
“There was only space for one drowned boy in her mother’s mind. And it wasn’t Sulafa’s son.
Gaafar’s narrative voice is understated, documentary in its accumulation of detail. The smell of incense and dried meat, the etiquette of trays and greetings, the unspoken hierarchy of women in the mourning house, it all builds into a dense social world where status is tracked, policed and performed. If the novel has a subject, it’s social reproduction: the everyday labour, mostly by women, of holding together a world that is visibly coming apart.
In Britain, while fiction from outside the Anglo-American mainstream remains marginal, it is gaining ground, and shifting shape. Publishers such as Fitzcarraldo, Tilted Axis, And Other Stories and Verso continue to produce award-winners that reshape the literary field. This shift isn’t only about translation. It’s also about English-language fiction being written beyond the old metropolitan centres, with other cadences, other inheritances. A Mouth Full of Salt is a novel written in English, but it isn’t shaped by London or New York. The English here is rooted in Sudan’s complex colonial history and reshaped in the mouths of those it tried to discipline. It refuses the global reader’s desire for neatness, uplift, or cultural instruction. It listens to other frequencies.
What’s striking is that A Mouth Full of Salt isn’t a translated text at all, but it reads with the clarity and estrangement of one. Written in English by a Sudanese writer, it offers a deeply embedded point of view without filtering the world through a Western frame. What fiction like this gives us, when it resists the habits of explanation or exoticism,
is access to how people think, how they narrate their own lives, how meaning is made within a specific social world. A news report can count the displaced, and a polemic can map the causes, but neither touches the textures of mourning, shame, obligation and silence in quite the same way. Gaafar shows us what it means to inhabit crisis without spectacle. It’s not just what happens, it’s how people go on living inside it.
To read A Mouth Full of Salt now is also to reckon with the near-erasure of Sudan from global political consciousness. The country has been plunged into catastrophe. A war between rival factions of the military has displaced millions, obliterated cities, and gutted what remained of the civic infrastructure. The revolution that briefly lit the streets in 2019 has been eclipsed by brutal counter-revolution. But Gaafar’s novel, written before the most recent descent into chaos, doesn’t need hindsight to feel urgent. It reminds us that Sudan was already in crisis: already a site of abandonment, patriarchy, and resistance woven into daily life. Literature cannot substitute for political analysis, but it can shape the sensibility through which political questions are approached. To read Gaafar is to begin, however belatedly, to take Sudan seriously.
“Opinions appeared to rank in importance and authority according to the size and height of the speaker’s turban.”
There are moments when the narrative risks dispersal, a hint of magical realism, an underdeveloped subplot, but the novel holds its line. The missing child is never just one child. He is the unspoken consequence of what happens when collective life is hollowed out: by capital, by the state, by the slow corrosion of belief. The body never surfaces. What remains is the wait, and the weight of it.
There are no heroes here, no redemptions. Just a village looking for a body.
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