"What drew Ann Hammond to me?" I met her when she was under twenty, studying Eastern languages at Oxford. She was full of life, her face intelligent and playful, her eyes sparkling with curiosity. She saw me and perceived a dark passion, like a false dawn. She was my opposite, longing for tropical climates, harsh suns, and violet horizons—while I, a Southerner, yearned for the North and its frost. In her eyes, I was a symbol of all that longing.

Mustafa Saeed was a man shrouded in secrets. His feet led him to settle in that Sudanese village to work in agriculture after having labored in Khartoum. He tended his land, plowed it, and sowed it. Yet in the evening, English poetry would flow from his lips as if he were English himself. His gaze held depth, his features radiated calm, and serenity seemed to seep through his being with quiet confidence.

He was no mere narrator of the tale of a man who once migrated North to a land of frost. That narrator was more passionate than the reader, following the strange secret of a man even stranger than himself, through the events and stories of Season of Migration to the North.