As Kip immerses himself in his writing, Mohammed's story - and then Mohammed himself - begins to speak to him, and his life becomes a Proustian portal into Kip's own memories and psyche. Both of their lives have been deeply affected by their confrontations with Whiteness, homophobia, their upper crust education, and their white romantic partners. Kip has only three weeks until his publisher's deadline to immerse himself in the mind of Mohammed who, like Kip, is Black, queer, an Other. A century later, Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring to write Mohammed's story. Forster, spent six months in a jail cell. In 1919, Mohammed el Adl, the young Egyptian lover of British author E. Forster and Mohammed el Adl-in which Mohammed's story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction. Rather like The Golden Notebook for a new age with race and sexuality replacing gender and class, this is the work of a brilliant, inventive, sensuous dreamer.'-Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters and Lives of the Circus AnimalsĪ dazzling, debut novel-within-a-novel in the vein of The Prophets and Memorial, about a young author writing about the secret love affair between E.M. Forster, Forster's Black Egyptian boyfriend, and others both earthly and unearthly. His narrator dances in a hall of mirrors but he doesn't dance alone-he is joined by his husband, his best female friend Concha, E. 'David Santos Donaldson's Greenland is profoundly entertaining and full of emotion, humor, pain, and wisdom. Rather like The Golden Notebook for a new age with race and sexuality replacing gender and class, this is the work of a brilliant, inventive, sensuous d.

Greenland by david santos donaldson