From a Crooked Rib

Nuruddin Farah · 1970 CE · Novel · East African · Contemporary

Ebla is eighteen, cannot read, and walks out of her grandfather's encampment in the Ogaden the night she learns he has promised her to an old man for camels. Belet Wene and then Mogadishu offer her a cousin, a widow's back room, a soldier and a broker, each arrangement a variation on the one she ran from. Farah wrote it in his twenties, and it is among the earliest African books to stay inside a woman's mind throughout.

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