Sep 01 2009
From Morocco to Timbuktu
Globe Corner Bookstore’s Shortlist of Literature From Morocco to Timbuktu
This list of literature is comprised of travelogues and fiction from Morocco, through North Africa, traversing the Sahara, and ending in the mysterious city of Timbuktu – a route that has been luring travelers for centuries. Whether you’re planning your own trek through the famed African desert or fantasizing about the mosques and labyrinthine markets of Casablanca, our list of classic stories from Morocco to Timbuktu will inspire readers and Bedouins alike.
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Travels with a Tangerine
by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
In 1325, the great Arab traveler Ibn Battutah set out from his native Tangier in North Africa on pilgrimage to Mecca. By the time he returned nearly thirty years later, he had seen most of the known world, covering three times the distance allegedly traveled by the great Venetian explorer Marco Polo–some 75,000 miles in all.
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The Sheltering Sky
by Paul Bowles
The story of three worldly young travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky is merciless in its evocation of the emotional dislocation induced by a foreign setting. As the Americans embark on an ill-fated journey through desolate terrain, they are pushed to the limits of human reason and intelligence by the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert. First published in 1949, it established Bowles as one of the most singular and promising writers of the postwar generation.
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In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
by Tahir Shah
In this entertaining and penetrating book, Tahir–author of The Caliph’s House–sets out on a bold new journey across Morocco that becomes an adventure worthy of the mythical Arabian Nights. As he wends his way through the labyrinthine medinas of Fez and Marrakesh, traverses the Sahara sands and tastes the hospitality of ordinary Moroccans, Tahir collects a dazzling treasury of traditional stories, gleaned from the heritage of A Thousand and One Nights.
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In the Country of Men
by Hisham Matar
Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman’s days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends played under the burning sun, exotic gifts from his father’ s constant business trips abroad. But his nights revolve around his mother’s increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. Shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, Matar’s debut novel tracks the effects of Libyan strongman Khadafy’s 1969 September revolution on the el-Dawani family, as seen by a child.
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My Mercedes Is Not for Sale: From Amsterdam to Ouagadougou: … An Auto-Misadventure Across the Sahara
by Jeroen Van Bergeijk
Jeroen van Bergeijk came up with what seemed like a great scheme for making a quick profit: buy a clunker of a car in Amsterdam and resell it in the Third World, where a market even for jalopies still thrives. His chariot of choice is a rusted-out 1988 Mercedes 190D with 220,000 kilometers on its odometer; his route will take him from Holland through Morocco, across the Sahara, and into some of the least trodden parts of Africa.
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Glory in a Camel’s Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert
by Jeffrey Tayler
Marvelously entertaining and frequently harrowing, Glory in a Camel’s Eye recounts the American travel writer Jeffrey Tayler’s dangerous three-month journey across the Moroccan Sahara in the company of Arab nomads, giving us an intimate, often surprising portrait of Saharan Africa: the cultural conflicts between native Berbers and Arabs, the clashes between devout desert-dwelling nomads and their city-dwelling counterparts.
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To Timbuktu: Journey Down the Niger
by Mark Jenkins
Mark Jenkins sets out with three friends to attempt their first descent of the Niger River, hoping to reach the legendary city of Timbuktu. Along the way they are attacked by killer bees, charged by hippos, and stalked by crocodiles. They stumble upon a group of completely blind men living alone in the bush and dance with a hundred naked women. That Jenkins finally reaches his goal–riding alone across the Sahara on a motorcycle–stands in sharp contrast to what befell earlier explorers who tried to find Timbuktu and whose fates the author interweaves with the narrative of his own journey.
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Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
by Fatima Marnissi
I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco…” So begins Fatima Mernissi in this exotic and rich narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth–women who, deprived of access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. Dreams of Trespass is the provocative story of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex in the recent Muslim world.
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Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa’s City of Gold
by Frank T. Kryza
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers — and fortune hunters — than the lost city of Timbuktu. Africa’s legendary City of Gold, not visited by Europeans since the Middle Ages, held the promise of wealth and fame for the first explorer to make it there. In 1824, the French Geographical Society offered a cash prize to the first expedition from any nation to visit Timbuktu and return to tell the tale.
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The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca
by Tahir Shah
By turns hilarious and harrowing, here is the story of his family’s move from the gray skies of London to the sun-drenched city of Casablanca, where Islamic tradition and African folklore converge-and nothing is as easy as it seems. Inspired by the Moroccan vacations of his childhood, Tahir Shah dreamed of making a home in that astonishing country. At age thirty-six he got his chance. Investing what money he and his wife, Rachana, had, Tahir packed up his growing family and bought Dar Khalifa, a crumbling ruin of a mansion by the sea in Casablanca that once belonged to the city’s caliph, or spiritual leader.
