Season of Migration to the North

A small village on the great bend of the Nile in northern Sudan, in Salih's own home country near Karmakol and the town of Ad-Dabbah. The narrator comes back from years of study in England to the palms, the water-wheels and the river of his childhood, and finds a stranger, Mustafa Sa'eed, whose buried life in 1920s London shadows the whole book. The map runs along the Dongola reach of the Nile and south to Khartoum, with one deliberate excursion north to the England of the flashback.

The narrator

The narrator's village on the great bend

Homecoming

The novel opens with a return: after seven years studying in England the narrator comes home to his family's small farming village on the Nile in northern Sudan. Palm groves, the water-wheel and the neighbours' talk stand in for a whole world he had half forgotten. Salih drew the setting from the country around his own birthplace at Karmakol, near Ad-Dabbah, though the village itself is left unnamed and stands for many like it.

Opening chapters

inferred The village is never named in this novel and reads as a composite of the settlements on Salih's home reach of the Nile; it is placed near Karmakol, the writer's birthplace just upstream of Ad-Dabbah, rather than at any address the book supplies.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

The narrator

Ad-Dabbah, the town on the Nile

Homecoming

The nearest real town to the world of the book is Ad-Dabbah, on the north bank of the Nile in Sudan's Northern State, at the western end of the great Dongola bend. Karmakol, where Salih was born, sits just upriver. The town grounds the fictional village in a place a reader can find: a farming and trading centre where the river swings back on itself.

Setting anchor, Northern Sudan

inferred Ad-Dabbah is not named in the novel; it is the real market town on this stretch of the Nile, the nearest anchor for Salih's unnamed village and for his birthplace at Karmakol a few kilometres to the east.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗