Then there’s that great pleasure of browsing the shelves with no objective. Before long, a title, a name—something foreign and unknown—calls out. Several years ago, for me, the title was Season of Migration to the North. In that moment, I knew I had something. Indeed, I knew I had it, a mysterious and poetic title, as well as the name of the kind of writer I spend much of my browsing time searching for: someone from a region I know little about—in the case of Tayeb Salih (1929-2009), author of Season of Migration to the North, northern Sudan.