Black Mamba Boy

A Novel

Nadifa Mohamed

Picador

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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.

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ADEN, YEMEN, OCTOBER 1935The muezzin’s call startled Jama out of his dream, and he pulled himself up to look at the sun rising over the cake-domed mosques, the gingerbread Adeni apartments glowing at their tips with white frosting. The black silhouettes of birds looped high in the inky sky, circling around the few remaining stars and the pregnant moon. The black planets of Jama’s eyes roamed over Aden—the busy, industrial Steamer Point; Crater, the sandstone old town, its curvaceous dun-colored buildings merging into the Shum Shum volcanoes; the Ma’alla and Sheikh Usman

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About the Author

Nadifa Mohamed

Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa, Somalia, in 1981 to a merchant marine father and a mother from a politically active family, and was trapped in exile when civil war erupted. She studied history and politics at Oxford, and has worked as a film researcher and scriptwriter.

Nadifa Mohamed

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Available Formats and Book Details

Black Mamba Boy
A Novel
Nadifa Mohamed

Trade Paperback

Trade Paperback
Picador
August 2011
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780312569235
ISBN10: 0312569238
5 1/16 x 7 15/16 inches, 304 pages, Includes one black-and-white map
$15.00
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Hardcover

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Hardcover
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
August 2010
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780374114190
ISBN10: 0374114196
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 304 pages, Map
$25.00
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e-Book Agency

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e-Book Agency
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
August 2010
e-Book Agency
ISBN: 9781429979795
ISBN10: 1429979798
304 pages
$9.99
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