Hush Now, Canary

When war erupts in Khartoum, a tax officer trapped inside his apartment begins writing his first novel. Outside, his neighborhood is collapsing. Inside, reality is becoming equally unstable: a dead woman blossoms into a garden, a canary appears at the window, and the boundary between testimony, hallucination, and memory begins to dissolve.

The canary moves through a succession of lives fractured by the conflict: a young woman fleeing with her family, a Syrian stranded among displaced people in Port Sudan, and a condemned prisoner whose past is inseparable from Sudan's long history of violence. Each narrator carries a different experience of fear, displacement, guilt, loneliness, and survival, while the bird's persistent song binds their stories together.

Moving between dark satire, philosophical reflection, stark realism, and the surreal, Hush Now, Canary asks what becomes of ordinary people when war destroys not only their homes, but also their sense of time, identity, truth, and belonging.

Winner of the 2025 Bait Al Ghasham-DarArab International Translation Prize, Authors' Category, Mustafa Khalid's inventive novel gives voice to those caught within Sudan's catastrophe-and to the stories that continue after their tellers have fallen silent.

Translated from Arabic by William M. Hutchins.