Khadija Abdalla Bajaber

The first Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize winner, a story of a girl’s fantastical sea voyage to rescue her father The House of Rust is an enchanting novel about a Hadrami girl in Mombasa. When her fisherman father goes missing, Aisha takes to the sea on a magical boat made of a skeleton to rescue him. She is guided by a talking scholar’s cat (and soon crows, goats, and other animals all have their say, too). On this journey Aisha meets three terrifying sea monsters. After she survives a final confrontation with Baba wa Papa, the father of all sharks, she rescues her own father, and hopes that life will return to normal. But at home, things only grow stranger. Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s debut is a magical realist coming-of-age tale told through the lens of the Swahili and diasporic Hadrami culture in Mombasa, Kenya. Richly descriptive and written with an imaginative hand and sharp eye for unusual detail, The House of Rust is a memorable novel by a thrilling new voice.

A Novel

The House of Rust

Marion

Being is to be alive, awake— to believe, not to roll under the world as it is. Are you alive if you do not question the world? If you do not go to war with yourself in deciding how to acquaint yourself with it or challenge it? At the end of all worlds, will you show how neat your miserly kept book of sums? Or will you have had the courage and say I did deeds good and bad, I disagreed with the world around me, I was awake and I believed and I doubted, but I was not immobilized.

I was alive, to the best of my abilities, I was alive."

The House of Rust quotes

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