Black Mamba Boy
Yemen, 1935. Jama is a
“market boy,” a half-feral child scavenging with his friends in the dusty
streets of a great seaport. For Jama, life is a thrilling carnival, at least
when he can fill his belly. When his mother—alternately raging and loving—dies
young, she leaves him only an amulet stuffed with one hundred rupees. Jama
decides to spend her life’s meager savings on a search for his never-seen
father; the rumors that travel along clan lines report that he is a driver for
the British somewhere in the north. So begins Jama’s extraordinary journey of
more than a thousand miles north all the way to Egypt, by camel, by truck, by
train, but mostly on foot. He slings himself from one perilous city to another,
fiercely enjoying life on the road and relying on his vast clan network to
shelter him and point the way to his father, who always seems just a day or two
out of reach.
In his travels, Jama will
witness scenes of great humanity and brutality; he will be caught up in the
indifferent, grinding machine of war; he will crisscross the Red Sea in search
of working papers and a ship. Bursting with life and a rough joyfulness, Black
Mamba Boy is debut novelist Nadifa Mohamed’s vibrant, moving celebration of her
family’s own history.
Black Mamba Boy was
longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Dylan Thomas Prize and
shortlisted for the John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize and the Guardian First
Book Award. It won the 2010 Betty Trask Prize.
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