Leila Aboulela’s collection of short stories in Elsewhere Home focuses on the sorrow of people who have left their homeland, and live a life that, for them, is emotionally somewhere in between their adopted home and the home of their heart, always yearning for some part of home. The alienation of living in a land unlike the one they were accustomed to, and finding a way to hold onto one’s identity without upsetting the balance of life for all.

”Her country disturbed him. It reminded him of the first time he had held a human bone, the touching simplicity of it, the strength. Such was the landscape of Khartoum; bone-coloured sky, a purity in the desert air, bareness. A bit austere and therefore static. But he was driven by feelings, that was why he was here, that was why he had crossed boundaries and seas, and now walked through a blaze of hot air from the airplane steps to the terminal.”

”He had thought, from the books he’d read and the particular British Islam he had been exposed to, that in a Muslim country he would find elegance and reason. Instead he found melancholy, a sensuous place, life stripped to the bare bones.”
---Something Old, Something New

These two quotes show the promise of the writing in these stories, the complexity of thoughts and a vision of the experience of immigrating to a new land where life is very different from your former home. If I found any fault in this collection, the theme runs so strongly through this collection that it tends to feel a bit too much like every story is just a variation on the same note, which lessens the emotional impact each story would hold on its own. Despite this, it is a collection that I found moving and thought provoking.


Pub Date: 12 Feb 2019


Many thanks for the ARC provided by Grove Atlantic / Grove Press / Black Cat

Aboulela maintains a certain tone...how to describe it? It's gentle and "soft-spoken" but with impeccable pacing, the tension and urgency build and then release.

These short stories are beautiful pieces of writing but they end too soon for my taste. I prefer her novel-length stories where in the course of a book, she draws out the reading experience.

My favorite stories were: Summer Maze, The Ostrich, The Boy from the Kebab House, Coloured Lights, and The Museum.

Thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for this advance reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review. Its general description is amply available on GoodReads, on Amazon and elsewhere.

Thank you to Net Gallery for the opportunity to read and review this book.
This book was very confusing to me.
First of all, I was unaware it was going to be short stories. I am not a fan of short stories and stay away from reading them.
Second, it just felt unfinished to me. Maybe due to the short story aspect? I’m not sure but I did not enjoy this book.
Overall, if you like short stories, this is a good book for you.

There are 13 stories in this slim volume. Some of them you'll find to be just the right length and others, well others you wish were much longer. Aboulela has written beautifully about the dislocations immigrants experience. In most cases, the characters are shifting between Sudan and Scotland but there are touchdowns elsewhere as well. Perfect for dipping in and out, highly topical, and nicely written. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. Short story fans should try this!

Leila Aboulela’s Elsewhere, Home is a well-written short story collection about characters—mostly Egyptian and Sudanese—who are displaced and trying to make lives and homes in England and Scotland. I appreciated the insights into the home cultures of these characters that their stories revealed, and learned a lot about their religious observances, marriage ceremonies, food and traditions, which I think is so important in the midst of the xenophobic atmosphere in the world and, particularly for these characters, the Brexit debacle.

That having been said, I sometimes felt that the stories blended into one another a bit, with Aboulela telling variations of the same theme—which a character perfectly summarized as “it seemed the fate of our generation is separation, from our country or our family”—in each of them. I think that if I had encountered any one of these stories as a stand alone piece in a literary journal, they would have had more impact, but when I read Elsewhere, Home straight through as a collection, I was left wanting a bit more variation and individuality in the characters and the choices they made in their lives. The stories that did stand out for me were Something Old, Something New, the vaguely menacing account of a Scottish man’s visit to Khartoum to marry his Sudanese girlfriend; The Boy From the Kebab Shop, in which an Arab girl born and raised in Britain has to choose between the promise of a new but more traditional life offered by her boyfriend and a dreary future with her alcoholic mother; and Coloured Lights, a rumination on the life and death of a beloved brother back in Khartoum by a displaced woman as she rides a double-decker bus around London at Christmastime.

I especially liked the story The Ostrich, which I think best conveyed the sense of alienation that comes with living your life in a place that never feels like home. In this one, a husband says to his wife, “I envy you because you are displaced, yet intact, unchanged, while I question everything and am not sure of anything anymore.” Each of the characters in Elsewhere, Home is questioning things about their displaced lives, trying to find something they can be sure of and struggling to remain, or become, intact. For readers who enjoyed What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah (but without the magical realism of that book) and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Publishing for providing an ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

These short stories are really beautiful and take the reader on a journey through multiple countries, each giving a sense of yearning for home - whether that "home" is the culture the character grew up in, or the one they settled in later in life. The contrast between the "here" and the "there" is crafted wonderfully by Leila Aboulela's work, and the emotions feel very real.

What is a shame is that each story has so much potential, and a build-up... and just as you're starting to frantically turn the page, it ends abruptly and you're introduced to new characters; to a new situation. It's often the case with short stories but in particular, none of these felt "finished" - instead they were snapshots into different characters' lives. Each of these stories could easily be the premise for a full-length novel and it's slightly disappointing that it wasn't the case.

The book has a definite theme - the aforementioned yearning for a home that the character no longer lives in - however after 13 stories, it begins to become a bit repetitive. That doesn't take away from the quality of the individual stories at all, plus the yearning takes many different forms throughout the book.

A good read, but just didn't quite hit the mark for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in return for an honest review!

Rating: 4/5⭐
💕Highlights
-cultural differences
-thought process of immigrants & their struggles
-the play of stereotypes & cultural pressure
All of this was executed in an excellent manner
💕The most beautiful factor I found was the writing style, it made me want to read more from the authors collection of work
💕Some of the "short stories" were more like long articles, they had no particular future road (some kind of suspense) they were unfolding into but had narratives where the protagonist related her/his present situation to something she/he experienced in the past, which most of the times would make the reading very tiresome & confusing but as I said before the narration was so beautiful it only made me go all "whoaa" after reading the sentences.

Elsewhere Home by Leila Aboulela is a collection of short stories. It is very interesting for people interested in multiculturality and also it gives some helpful insight in it even to those who are not.

Elsewhere Home is a collection of stories connected by the idea of Muslim diaspora - characters who either through marriage or education fund themselves away from home, often in the countries of their birth or heritage.

The stories are thematically connected, so much so that I often forgot I was reading short stories and confused myself trying to connect the characters!

The writing is lyrical and evokes both place and displacement very strongly.

Read More Book Reviews on my blog It's Good To Read - Link: http://ebookwormssite.wordpress.com

Summary:
A collection of thirteen short stories, from the viewpoint of Muslims living in Scotland, or having Scotland as a base/destination.

The themes are invariably homesickness, a cultural disconnect with either their religion, or a distance from their home country (invariably Egypt).

The stories are wide and varied, from the young newly-pregnant wife in “Expecting to Give”, waiting for her husband to come back off the North Sea oil rigs on his two week furlough, to the converted foreigner travelling to Egypt to get married. Mixed-race marriages are also written about, as are the cultural expectations depending on where you are living. The bulk of the stories are written from the woman’s viewpoint.

The stories explore the various relationships, for example the fiancé above, in the story “Something Old, Something New”, experiences his wife-to-be as being perfect, and everything he could want, soft, kind “he can’t live without her”, etc., until a period of stress sets in and he sees different sides of her personality emerge, which becomes somewhat of a rude awakening. He also realises that he has biases towards the people he will now be married into, which disturbs him, and awakens feelings of being threatened, and fears of isolation in a strange country.

Another story tells of a young wife transported from Khartoum to a gritty Scottish city, presumably the Aberdeen of the author, where her Scottish husband loses the glamour and attractiveness that being a white man in Africa gave him, and he becomes just an ordinary man wanting his few pints with the lads, and watching TV.

A third story tells of a marriage of convenience, but where the immigrant husband actually falls in love with his new family (the wife was divorced, now converted to Islam, and had two kids from her previous marriage).

There is no obvious continuous thread through these stories – they are not linked by a central character or narrative. For me, what gives this some coherence is the almost tangible emotions of each of the characters. For example, I really felt the humiliation and despair of the poor schoolgirl with increasingly defective eyesight, whose academic results had slipped badly. Her family would not get her glasses, for fear she’d be deemed ugly, but she was saved by the teacher.

There is a lot of loneliness in these stories, where the characters feel emotionally or physically disconnected [sometimes both] either from their surroundings, or their faith. Faith plays a large part in their lives, but it is a practical, day-to-day faith, where some are casual towards it and others more observant. (In one story, the narrator’s converted white wife is actually way more devout than he is, for example). This leads to a lot of conflict in the characters, not necessarily resolved at the story’s close.

What I Liked:
- Precise writing style – there is nothing affected or forced about their lives, which are ordinary yet truthful in how they are described
- Well-defined characters.
- The humour in observing a relationship, such as in the mother-daughter trip back to Egypt in “Summer Maze”, and the relief/disappointment at unsuccessful marriage arrangement plans.

What I Didn’t Like:
- Some of the plot endings were predictable, e.g. the ultimate disappointment of the housewife in “Pages of Fruit”.

Overall:
The power of these short stories lie in the characterisation. They are flawed, insecure, distrustful, scared, hopeful, excited, nervous. They are homesick and conflicted. Many feel they are strangers in a strange land (this holds for the young British Muslim going back to Egypt, as well as the Egyptians living in the UK).

Not knowing anything about what it is like to be a Muslim woman living in the UK, for me the ability of the author to pin down their emotions, and how they go about their lives while dealing with these concerns, makes for absorbing reading. Well worth a read!

Acknowledgements:
Thanks to NetGalley and the author for sending me a free copy of this book, in return for an honest and objective review.

Thirteen short stories of people of all walks of life with one thing in common. They all live away from their homeland.

Some stories were more inspiring than others but all were well written with lots of detail.

I found this book quite difficult to begin with as the story felt as if it was quite slow paced.
It was a book that made me think therefore I really had to concentrate whilst reading it.
I did enjoy the book however it did take me some time to read it and I had to go back to karts to remind me of the story.

A collection of short stories highlighting the immigrant experience in Great Britain. The stories, although on a theme, we’re quite varied in point of view, country of origin and story line. Likewise the success of the stories, in my opinion, varied quite a bit as well. Overall, a mixed bag.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to finish Elsewhere Home in the allotted time. However I really enjoyed what I did read (about half). Aboulela’s stories were engaging, beautifully written and provided an insight into places/culture/communities that I know very little about. I will be seeking this book out to finish it.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book, but I have to say that I quite enjoyed it. Fab characters and a great structure

This book is a compilation of short stories. The endearing aspect of the book is that the stories are about people and circumstances you can identify with. And yet, almost none of the stories exploit the potential the build up offers - skimming the surface of characterisation or relationships. Quite a few deal with multi-cultural relationships and yet you are left feeling there is something missing.

Character building, tempo and lasting impressions are more difficult to create in short stories. While the stories are charming, and worth a read, they fall far short of potential.

Thanks to Netgalley for offering me this book in return to honest review. This book is a collection of short stories which explains us every one's journey is different and life is not always fair to people. I really not good at short stories reading and so I didn't enjoy it though it's beautifully written. This is not to my taste and type.

So I really wish I knew this was a short story collection. I don't mind short stories but need to be in a mood to read them. I trudged along though and in the end I'm glad I did, even though I honestly was not in the mood.
Each story was told from the perspective of Muslim immigrants from the African continent (Sudan, Egypt etc) living in the UK (London and Scotland mainly) and just gave a glimpse of the social complications as a result. Life, Love, just existing with, marrying two cultures in everyday life etc. I loved that most of the stories took place in both the UK and African continent.

Reading this book certainly opened my eyes to the issues immigrants faces / faced in Britain. You will learn what lies in the heart of these immigrants. They emigrate to find better life. And yet they are not accepted in their adopted country. And it gets worse when people finds out that they are Muslims. With Islamphobia in the West getting worse, how will this affect the immigrants. As a Malaysian secondary school teacher, I find this issue interesting. Here in Malaysia racism are aplenty. When you are not Malay and Islam, people tend to overlook you.

Elsewhere Home by Leila Aboulela
I really enjoyed this collection. This is a work of fiction, however they felt like true stories to me. The characters felt real, like someone you could encounter any time, anywhere. There are descriptions of people of different cultures meeting and accepting their differences. The author was able to draw me into the personal lives of the many characters. Numerous situations are covered of people who are separated from and who miss their homes and their families. Some cope and some don’t cope so well. This is a good enjoyable book. I highly recommend it. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the advance reader copy of this book in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion of this book.