Once privileged, newly impoverished

LEILA ABOULELA is one of a growing number of writers of the African diaspora to describe the cultural dislocations of exile triggered by civil war and other upheavals. Raised in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, and now living in Scotland and Dubai, Aboulela has attracted considerable literary attention in Britain. In 2000, she won the first Caine Prize for African writing (for her short story “The Museum”) and her first novel, “The Translator,” was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction, which recognizes women writing in English.

“Minaret,” her second novel and her first work to be published in the United States, traces the fall of a Sudanese government official’s daughter from her privileged Westernized Khartoum family to a tenuous life in London. “I’ve come down in the world,” Najwa announces on the first page. “I’ve slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn’t much room to move.”

As a Khartoum teenager in 1984, Najwa and her twin brother, Omar, share a Toyota Corolla and accompany their parents on holidays in Geneva and London. She and her friends enjoy watching “Dallas” and going to discos, drinking Pepsi, eating pizza and cupcakes as well as ta’miyah and samosas. She dresses in short skirts and tight blouses, not traditional Muslim garb. In her first year at university, she has a chaste dalliance with Anwar, a leftist student who chides her for living so well in a country mired in poverty. Their friendship ends when he gives a speech denouncing her father for corruption.

The following year, a coup sends Najwa, her mother and brother fleeing in the night to their London flat. Her father is tried and hanged and their political exile becomes permanent. “[T]he earth we were standing on split open and we tumbled down.... As if this was our punishment, a bottomless pit, the roar of each other’s screams. We became unfamiliar to each other simply because we had not seen each other fall before.”

The family begins to disintegrate. Omar stabs an undercover policeman while being arrested for selling drugs and he goes to prison for 15 years. Her mother dies of cancer. She drops out of school. Her uncle and his family leave for Canada. Najwa is alone. Five years after leaving Khartoum, she reconnects with Anwar. They begin an affair, which makes her feel guilty.

Inexorably, she descends into poverty, becoming a servant to wealthy Arabs. When it is clear that Anwar won’t marry her, she turns to the Muslim women at the Regent’s Park mosque, drawn to an atmosphere that reminds her of Khartoum.

She learns to wear the head scarf, finding that it makes her look “dignified and gentle.” She sees herself as unimpressive, with no religious upbringing, “no degree, no husband, no money.” By 2003, she is working for a woman whose devout teenage brother has developed a crush on her. Again, romance leads to trouble.

Aboulela’s portrait of Najwa is tautly focused, revealing the young woman’s powerful sense of loss and confusion: “Sometimes I want to die; not out of despair or fear but just to step away from life and stand in the shade, watch it roll on without me, changeable and aggressive.”

In describing Najwa’s transformation from a young Sudanese girl whose dreams are shaped by American movies and pop songs into a humble London maid who dreams of making the pilgrimage to Mecca, “Minaret” offers a glimpse of why an immigrant whose world is crumbling might turn to traditional Islam: “Refresh my memory,” Najwa prays. “Teach me something old. Shock me. Comfort me. Tell me what will happen in the future, what happened in the past.... Explain to me why I am here, what am I doing. Explain to me why I came down in the world. Was it natural, was it curable?”

Najwa is a woman caught in history’s web and the novel’s ending leaves the unsettling impression that her struggles are far from over.

Jane Ciabattari is author of the short-story collection “Stealing the Fire.”