Best Seller
Broken Heart Syndrome
Hardcover
$32.00
Available on Jun 22, 2027 | 288 Pages
A vivid portrait of a Somali-British community whose bonds are tested when past violence and betrayals return to haunt them, from the Booker Prize–shortlisted author of The Fortune Men
“Nadifa Mohamed is a revelation—she writes with the fierce compassionate lightning of a truth-teller, lays bare the ghastly colonial condition that afflicts so many of us, where truth cannot overcome injustice.” —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Yasmin, a doctor in a London neonatal ICU, is at her limit with her mother and sister’s neediness and ingratitude. So when Yasmin’s sister, Ayan, gets engaged, Yasmin sees it as a welcome invitation—from now on, the attention will be all on Ayan, who now bears the weight of providing grandchildren for their hovering mother, Amina. Their father long ago abandoned them, returning back to Somaliland to start a second family.
Yasmin, Ayan, and Amina are three in a mosaic of characters in west London, where families moved from East Africa to escape sectarian violence but have now found themselves haunted by the old allegiances of their homelands. Also among them are Khalid, a cab driver whose daily plagues include arguing with traffic cops and stopping passengers from vaping, and Halima, a sister-cum-mother who is grappling with both a deceitful ex-boyfriend and her relationship to Islam.
Their paths are all set on a collision course when one day, Amina suffers what appears to be a heart attack after claiming to see the man who murdered her brother, Hassan, back in Somalia during the 1990s Civil War, now driving a bus in London; just days later, Yasmin finds a bag of cassettes recorded by Hassan, and she goes searching for answers where most discourage her from looking.
Switching seamlessly between perspectives, from Yasmin in the NICU to Khalid in an overheating taxi to Hassan in a war-torn hospital, Broken Heart Syndrome is a touching portrait of an ethnic enclave making home in a new country, but unable to outrun the pains of the homeland: “You force yourself to abandon your country because that seems the only way to leave all the horror behind but it also moves, joins you.” With the sumptuous descriptions of sambuusas cooking, maghrib prayers at sunset, and ornate wedding abayas of contemporary London, contrasted with the violence, gore, and increasingly-panicked missives from a war-torn Somalia, Mohamed transports readers to a moment in a community on the brink, where the Somali sun and a hunt for justice threaten to bring long-boiling tensions to a riotous conclusion.
“Nadifa Mohamed is a revelation—she writes with the fierce compassionate lightning of a truth-teller, lays bare the ghastly colonial condition that afflicts so many of us, where truth cannot overcome injustice.” —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Yasmin, a doctor in a London neonatal ICU, is at her limit with her mother and sister’s neediness and ingratitude. So when Yasmin’s sister, Ayan, gets engaged, Yasmin sees it as a welcome invitation—from now on, the attention will be all on Ayan, who now bears the weight of providing grandchildren for their hovering mother, Amina. Their father long ago abandoned them, returning back to Somaliland to start a second family.
Yasmin, Ayan, and Amina are three in a mosaic of characters in west London, where families moved from East Africa to escape sectarian violence but have now found themselves haunted by the old allegiances of their homelands. Also among them are Khalid, a cab driver whose daily plagues include arguing with traffic cops and stopping passengers from vaping, and Halima, a sister-cum-mother who is grappling with both a deceitful ex-boyfriend and her relationship to Islam.
Their paths are all set on a collision course when one day, Amina suffers what appears to be a heart attack after claiming to see the man who murdered her brother, Hassan, back in Somalia during the 1990s Civil War, now driving a bus in London; just days later, Yasmin finds a bag of cassettes recorded by Hassan, and she goes searching for answers where most discourage her from looking.
Switching seamlessly between perspectives, from Yasmin in the NICU to Khalid in an overheating taxi to Hassan in a war-torn hospital, Broken Heart Syndrome is a touching portrait of an ethnic enclave making home in a new country, but unable to outrun the pains of the homeland: “You force yourself to abandon your country because that seems the only way to leave all the horror behind but it also moves, joins you.” With the sumptuous descriptions of sambuusas cooking, maghrib prayers at sunset, and ornate wedding abayas of contemporary London, contrasted with the violence, gore, and increasingly-panicked missives from a war-torn Somalia, Mohamed transports readers to a moment in a community on the brink, where the Somali sun and a hunt for justice threaten to bring long-boiling tensions to a riotous conclusion.
Author
Nadifa Mohamed
NADIFA MOHAMED was born in 1981 in Hargeisa, Somaliland. At the age of four she moved with her family to London. She is the author of Black Mamba Boy and The Orchard of Lost Souls. She has received both The Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, and in 2013, she was named as one of Granta‘s Best of Young British Novelists. Her work appears regularly in The Guardian and the BBC. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she lives in London.
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