Stella Gaitano: رواح إدو (Edo’s Souls)

The latest addition to my website is Stella Gaitano‘s رواح إدو (Edo’s Souls).This is the story of South Sudan, with the background being the upheavals that led to South Sudan breaking away from Sudan, something that affects most of the protagonists. Edo had the misfortune to lose nine of her ten children before their first birthday, with only Lucy surviving. Lucy meets Marco the day of Edo’s funeral and they marry and move to Khartoum, living with Marco’s friend Peter and his wife, Theresa. Lucy has lots of children to make up for her mother’s misfortunes. Much of the book is the relationship between our four protagonists, which is not always smooth and how they cope with Peter’s foster family, including the older sister who fights for women’s rights, a key theme of this book, and how they fare as the political situation dramatically worsens. It is a complex book which gives us both a portrait of Sudan/South Sudan at that time as well as telling an excellent feminist story

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