“Moving, gentle, ironic, quietly angry and beautifully written.”
- Ben Okri on The Museum
“Aboulela is the kind of writer from whom British people need to hear. She is a remarkable fruit of the Scottish realist school: that bleak, resolutely unprivileged, documentary eye is guided here through new terrain. Aboulela turns the fact of cultural difference round and round until it becomes in her hands a perfect sphere…… Again and again [she] conveys the sense of two worlds touching and creating a further world, a new place in which it is exciting to find such a gifted writer”
- The Telegraph
“Leila Aboulela is a master at teasing the extraordinary out of the ordinary … [she] weaves her stories around moments which seem small but are deafening in their demand to be heard.”
- Lesley McDowell, The Scotsman
“ These stories are about states of transition, about various encounters between Islam and the west. All Leila Aboulela’s Muslim characters – recent immigrants, some British and born to Muslim parents, others converts to the faith – discover a sense of direction through religion, made stronger through the feelings of displacement.”
- Natalie Brierley, The New Statesman
“Everyday situations are elevated by Aboulela’s eye for detail and quiet humour, her deep understanding of inter-cultural suspicion. Also striking is her versatility: some tales are tendered in wry authorial voice, others are harrowingly subjective. Original and immediate, Aboulela’s writing stands apart….”
- The List
“An exciting…writer who is not afraid to tackle troublesome issues.”
- Worldview
