Saba arrives in an East African refugee camp as a young girl, devastated to have had to abandon her books as her family fled. In this crowded and often hostile place, she must carve out her new existence, always protecting her mute brother Hagos.

A moving portrait of a woman of courage and intelligence, an insider’s view of the textures of life in a refugee camp, and a compelling story of exile, survival and love, Silence is My Mother Tongue bears vivid testimony to the power of imagination and illusion and the infinite reach of human minds to reinvent themselves.

Both intimate and epic, Sulaiman Addonia’s extraordinary, subversive and sensual second novel dissects society’s ability to wage war on its own women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.