Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon: “an illuminating, courageous novel”
Beyond Babylon is an epic for an era of migrants, border-crossings, and traumatic conflicts. Igiaba Scego’s virtuosic novel encompasses Argentina’s horrific dirty war, the chaotic final years of Siad Barre’s brutal dictatorship in Somalia—which ended in catastrophic civil war—and the modern-day excesses of Italy’s right-wing politics.
“[Scego] gives voice to multiple lives, experiences, and emotions either silenced or ignored by history. [Beyond Babylon] resembles no other Italian novel to have migrated thus far into English.” — from Jhumpa Lahiri’s introduction. Read an essay adapted from the introduction in the New York Review of Books(opens in a new tab).
“Though ten years have passed since the novel’s original publication in Italy, its wider political nuances don’t feel any less urgent….Beyond Babylon ultimately succeeds in rendering these on a human level – ‘within her story, the story of others before her and others after. The stories entwine, at times converging, often searching for one another. Each one united by a colour and a feeling’”.—The Times Literary Supplement(opens in a new tab)
“A prolific writer of novels, short stories, and essays for Italian newspapers and magazines, Scego belongs to a group of contemporary authors of African descent who have been articulating fraught dynamics of belonging to Italian society and literature.” — Public Books(opens in a new tab)
“What a wonderful, shocking, heartbreaking, exciting book, and how better to tell this story than through Aaron Robertson’s entrancing and pitch-perfect translation.” — Jennifer Croft, Man Booker International Prize–winning translator and author
Recommended in The New York Times’(opens in a new tab) “Globetrotting” feature of 2019 world literature.
An interview with Lahiri about the book is online at NYRB Daily(opens in a new tab).
Check out an excerpt from the book(opens in a new tab).
Order your copy now!
