Sudan

The Gilded Acorn is an independent bookshop located at the heart of LSE. Thoughtfully curated and proudly welcoming, it offers a diverse range of titles spanning the social sciences, literature, and contemporary thought. A quiet hub for curiosity and conversation, it serves students, staff, and visitors alike as a place to browse, reflect, and discover. Below is a selection of Sudanese fiction, made by the management, and available at the bookshop on campus on online.

Reading recommendations

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

A foundational work of modern Arabic literature, this novel stages a charged encounter between two Sudanese men shaped by different worlds. Returning from Europe, the narrator meets Mustafa Sa’eed, whose past conceals obsession, desire, and violence. Their intertwined stories expose the psychological legacy of colonialism and the imbalance of power between cultures. Lyrical yet unsettling, the novel resists moral certainty. Its questions about identity and domination remain enduringly relevant.

Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun

This short story collection offers a penetrating portrait of women’s lives in contemporary Sudan. Across multiple narratives, moments of love, longing, and endurance unfold within constraining social realities. The stories privilege interiority, capturing how political and personal pressures quietly shape daily existence. Written with restraint and clarity, the prose attends to small gestures with lasting weight. A subtle yet insistent exploration of survival through multiplicity.

Minaret by Leila Aboulela

After political upheaval shatters her privileged life, Najwa is forced into exile in London. Displacement brings vulnerability, but also an unexpected turn toward faith. Through her moral and spiritual reckoning, the novel explores devotion, class, and female agency without sentimentality. Set within Muslim immigrant communities rarely centred in fiction, it offers a nuanced portrayal of belief. A quietly powerful novel of loss and renewal.

Samahani by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin

Set in nineteenth-century Zanzibar, Samahani confronts the brutal history of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Drawing on real events, it traces intersecting lives shaped by violence, vengeance, and exploitation. The novel exposes the complicity of local, Arab, and European powers without offering moral refuge. Its tone is deliberately raw and unflinching. A challenging work that insists on historical reckoning rather than comfort.

Girls That Never Die by Safia Elhillo

This poetry collection bears witness to women living under violence, erasure, and constraint. The poems move between mythic resonance and lived reality, drawing power from repetition and incantation. Voices emerge from grief, anger, and refusal, insisting on presence where silence is expected. Lyrical yet uncompromising, the work resists narrative closure. A fierce poetic assertion of survival.

Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas

Set during a period of political tension, this novel captures the atmosphere of fear that permeates everyday life. Ordinary routines are unsettled by surveillance, rumour, and the weight of unspoken threat. Memory and absence shape the narrative as strongly as visible events. Written with quiet precision, it evokes the psychology of living under uncertainty. An understated and haunting exploration of unrest.

River Spirit by Leila Aboulela

A sweeping historical novel set in late nineteenth-century Sudan, River Spirit reimagines a society under immense pressure. Against the backdrop of imperial encroachment and religious upheaval, individual lives unfold in moments of resistance and belief. The novel grounds epic events in intimate human experience. Meticulously researched and vividly imagined, it challenges simplified historical narratives. A work of scope, conviction, and moral urgency.

The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction. Anthology

This anthology presents Khartoum through a mosaic of voices and stories. From private domestic moments to broader social transformation, the city emerges as complex and contradictory. Each contribution captures a distinct fragment of urban life shaped by history and imagination. Together, the stories resist a single narrative of place. A rare and compelling literary portrait of a city.

The Fugitives by Jamal Mahjoub

A tense and morally charged novel about flight and consequence. As its characters attempt to escape political and personal danger, the past presses relentlessly upon them. Borders are crossed, but nothing is left behind without cost. The prose is controlled, the tension cumulative. A stark meditation on guilt, responsibility, and survival.

The Grub Hunter by Amir Taj al-Sir

Darkly satirical and unsettling, this novel follows a young man navigating hunger, ambition, and exclusion. Its abrasive voice exposes the hypocrisies of class, power, and social aspiration. Humour sharpens rather than softens its critique. Beneath the provocation lies a serious examination of survival in an unforgiving world. Original, confrontational, and deliberately uncomfortable.