“Salutation Road” by Salma Ibrahim is a beautifully told, speculative literary debut about the everyday struggles of immigration, love and letting go of a past that never really existed. For fans of Nadifa Mohamed and Mohsin Hamid.
23-year-old Sirad Ali is a woman adrift. Abandoned by her father in childhood, she does her best to support her mother and younger brother in their small flat in South London. But she can't help but wonder if this is the life she really wants.
Until one morning, when she boards the bus to work in Greenwich, she finds herself transported to an alternate reality in present-day Mogadishu. There she encounters her double, Ubah—the woman she could have been had her parents never fled to London during the Somali Civil War. And what follows will change both of their lives for ever
"A bold, intriguing act of imagination . . . Salutation Road confronts important questions about parallel existences splintered by immigration, the price of survival, and the ways migration and distance reshape blood ties and family"
Aube Rey Lescure, Women's Prize shortlisted author of River East, River West
"Beautiful, thought-provoking and meaningful"
Nussaibah Younis, author of Fundamentally
"Ibrahim's writing, sentence by sentence, is textured, original and worth savouring. She explores immigration and family, and through alternate realities, the way a single change can lead to a totally different life"
