Mother / Land - by Faraaz Mahomed (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An apparition of his deceased mother appears to law professor, Salim Bardien, in New York on the same day that a massive student protest movement erupts in Cape Town. She comes to foretell a revelation, an invisible stain for him to clean. The news itself--that Salim's birth was the product of his mother's illicit affair with a white politician in 1960s South Africa--comes from a newly found half-sister, Bertha. Yet more disorder follows when Bertha reveals that their brother is dying of cancer, and that Salim's bone marrow may be the only hope of saving him.

How can one secret alter--or even redeem--a life? How strong are familial bonds across distances and generations? And how do the struggles of another era echo those of today? As Salim, now a husband and father, wrestles with these questions in the present, his mother Sawligha's forbidden love story unfolds in the past.

Set between New York and Cape Town--across eras spanning apartheid's forced removals and the rise of Black Lives Matter--and moving through lives, deaths, and the liminal spaces between, Mother/Land is the story of family, and of the world we inherit from those that came before us.

Review Quotes

"In this riveting novel, Faraaz Mahomed brings alive the emotional complexities of South Africa's apartheid past and their ongoing legacies. He is a richly gifted writer; Mother/Land is an urgent and important book." -- Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Children

"Mother/Land is an illuminating read. However we choose to demarcate the world" -- Global

"North/Global South, Developed World/Developing World, First World/Third World - the linkages we try to erase and not acknowledge are always already there. Faraaz Mahomed's insightful novel shows us that injustice anywhere is deeply connected to injustices everywhere. This is an important story about the entangled nature of history." -- Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, author of The Theory of Flight, Windham-Campbell Prize recipient

About the Author

Faraaz Mahomed is a researcher in the field of mental health and human rights, based between New York and his native South Africa. His short stories and travel writing have appeared in Granta, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, the Sunday Times, and other publications. In 2016, he won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the African Region with his story "The Pigeon. "He has been mentored by Damon Galgut and Claire Messud.