Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (1966)

Behind a locked door in a mud-walled house on the Nile waits a perfect English drawing room: mahogany, leather-bound books, a fireplace that has never held a fire, all of it sealed in the heart of a Sudanese village. The man who built it, Mustafa Sa'eed, once went the other way, north into London, where he made himself into exactly what the West longed to find in a dark stranger from the south, and turned that fantasy into a weapon. Three of the women who loved the myth he performed killed themselves; his English wife died at his hands, and London put him on trial. Tayeb Salih wrote the great answer to _Heart of Darkness_, the voyage reversed, conquest traveling back up the river toward those who sent it out. The narrator who comes home from his own English years recognizes in this stranger the self colonial education made possible, and cannot look away. When the Nile that runs through every page finally asks him to choose, the whole book holds its breath.