From the Bookshelf of Around the World in 80 Books…

[close] Our choice for Somalia: The first novel in Farah's universally acclaimed Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk chronicles one man's search for the reasons behind his twin brother's violent death during the 1970s. The atmosphere of political tyranny and repression reduces our hero's quest to a passive and fatalistic level; his search for reasons and answers ultimately becomes a search for meaning. The often detective-story-like narrative of this novel thus moves on a primarily interior plane as "Farah takes us deep into territory he has charted and mapped and made uniquely his own" (Chinua Achebe).

Farah often states that his intention is to "keep his country alive by writing about it." And his remarkable novels, at the cost of exile from his homeland for over 25 years, strip bare the political and social horror of a country wrought by civil war.
https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/s...

Bonus points: Sweet and Sour Milk is published by Minnesota-based Graywolf Press.