Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad about a narrated voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in the so-called "heart of Africa". Charles Marlow, the narrator, tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. This setting provides the frame for Marlow's story of his obsession with the ivory trader Kurtz, which enables Conrad to create a parallel between what Conrad calls "the greatest town on earth", London, and Africa as places of darkness.
Season of Migration to the North
The novel has been translated into more than twenty languages. Salih was fluent in both English and Arabic, but chose to pen this novel in Arabic. The English translation was published in 1969 as part of the influential Heinemann African Writers Series. The novel is a counternarrative to "Heart of Darkness". It was described by Edward Said as one of the six great novels in Arabic literature. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century.