'We may look the same, but I am not you . . . We share nothing but a reflection in the mirror'
Salutation Road by Salma Ibrahim is a beautifully told literary debut about the everyday struggles of immigration, love and letting go of a past that never really existed. For fans of Nadifa Mohamed and Mohsin Hamid.
Twenty-three-year-old Sirad Ali is a woman adrift. Abandoned by her father in childhood, doing her best to support her mother and younger brother in their small flat in South London, she can't help but wonder if this is the life she really wants.
One morning, Sirad boards her bus to work and finds herself transported to an alternate timeline in present-day Mogadishu. Over the course of a single day, under the sweltering East African sun, Sirad must contend with a lost reality. There she encounters an almost unrecognizable version of her family and comes face to face with her double, Ubah - the woman she could have been, had her parents never fled to London during the Somali Civil War.
Back home in Greenwich, Sirad must go on with life, consumed by all she now knows. But then Ubah mysteriously appears in London, and Sirad begins to understand that nothing will ever be the same again . . .