The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed

The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed – review

Anita Sethi
Sunday, August 18, 2013

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Nadifa Mohamed justifies her place on this year's Granta list with a powerful and atmospheric tale of women and loss.

Loss pervades this atmospheric second novel from Somali-born author Nadifa Mohamed, one of Granta's best of young British novelists 2013. Loss haunted her first novel, too, Black Mamba Boy, a fictional account of her father's intrepid journey in search of his own absent father.

Set in Hargeisa, northern Somalia in the turbulent time of the late 1980s leading up to the civil war, her absorbing new novel skilfully uses the perspectives of three women spanning the generations – nine-year-old refugee Deqo, a young female soldier, Filsan, and the widow Kawsar – to devastatingly capture things falling apart.

The urgent search for what is missing or lost proves poignant. All of these characters are seeking something, whether physical or emotional: young Deqo pines for her first pair of shoes; the lonely Kawsar lolling in her orchard craves heat (her "bones ache for sunlight"), and Filsan the feisty female soldier moves to Mogadishu aspiring to suppress the rising rebellion and find peace. As violence escalates, the direst loss is of life, Mohamed unflinchingly depicting humans turned by war into "just slack skin over bones", Kawsar wracked by a "complex agony".

Juxtaposed with the brutality and pain caused by humans is natural beauty – stars through a window's iron bars; the smell of the orchard's jasmine, honeysuckle, and moonflowers.

The narrative gathers incremental lyric power, growing in strength, as Kawsar shores up memories amid her mourning ("sunken sounds washing up from the seabed of her mind"). Rhythm is both a theme and quality of this vigorous writing, which shows music's ability to trigger memory; yet this isn't a book dwelling only in the past but about powerful women crafting the future, yearning to rebuild what has crumbled.

"It needs a real city to pound new rhythms out of life", writes Mohamed, vividly capturing rhythm in the quotidian, from the tick of the town hall clock to the whistle of the traffic policeman – "it needs all of this for new, pulse-quickening styles to germinate and flower". This novel shows its author blossoming into her talent with her own innovative, at times pulse-quickening style, distilling startling language from loss.

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