I speak of Africa and golden joys
HENRY IV, Act V, Sc.3

The most celebrated Arabic novel of the twentieth century is a sensual and shocking thriller from Sudan. Its fluid structure and elusive tone have defied many attempts to dramatise it in different media, but make it uniquely suited for radio. This dramatisation, the only one completed during Salih's lifetime, was made for BBC Radio 3 last year.

Not even the work of the recent Nobel Prize Winner, Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, has achieved the literary status of SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH by Sudanese-bornTayeb Salih. First published in Arabic in 1966, this short novel's translation into English in 1969 triggered a series of translations into all major languages, from Norwegian to Japanese, and a cult following. In 1989, it became the first Arabic novel to be published in the Penguin Classics series, and in 2001 was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century. Its intelligent and richly poetic engagement with the ambivalences of the colonial legacy have made it a book which now features on University syllabuses around the world, and about which doctorates are written. Conversely it is still regularly banned and unbanned in states throughout the Arab world, and is currently banned in the place where it is so memorably set, the tiny rural villages of remote northern Sudan.

A young man returns to his beloved home 'on the bend of the Nile' after seven years studying in London, where he is proud to have completed a doctorate on the life of a minor English poet. He is comforted to find that the traditional life of the village he loves hasn't changed at all. Except for one man. A mysterious stranger has married into the village and settled down to farm. Then the stranger seeks him out. He has a tale to tell, and only a scholar can hear it. But the telling of the tale will lead them both into two brutally sexual murders, and turn the idyllic world of their village into hell.