Somalia

Salutation Road

Name: Salutation Road
ISBN: 978-1035044351

by Salma Ibrahim

Identity & Belonging Fiction 2025

Summary

Twenty-three-year-old Sirad Ali feels trapped between the life she has inherited and the future she dreams of. Living in South London, she struggles to support her mother and younger brother while carrying the wound of her father’s abandonment. But one ordinary morning, her commute takes an extraordinary turn: she finds herself transported to an alternate version of Mogadishu, where her family has lived an entirely different life. There, she encounters Ubah, her double—the woman she might have become had her parents never fled Somalia during the civil war. When Ubah later appears in London, the boundaries between their worlds begin to blur. Blending magical realism with an intimate exploration of migration and family, Salutation Road asks a haunting question: How different would we be if our families had made different choices?

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Country

Somalia

Africa

About the author

Salma Ibrahim

Salma Ibrahim is a Somali British novelist, short-story writer, and marketing professional based in South London. Alongside her work in marketing at UNICEF, she writes fiction exploring migration, identity, family, and the experiences of people living between cultures. She is also the founder of Literary Natives, an organisation dedicated to creating opportunities and providing support for writers of colour. Her debut novel, Salutation Road, follows a young Somali British woman who encounters an alternate version of her life, exploring how migration and family history shape our sense of self and belonging. The novel won the London Writers Award in 2019 while still in development and was a runner-up for the Future Worlds Prize in 2021. Ibrahim’s writing brings an imaginative perspective to questions of displacement, inherited memory, and the lives we might have lived.

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Details

Published: 2025
Author: Salma Ibrahim