RaveGlobe and Mail (UK)As a long-time fan of his thoughtful and charismatic voice, to see Abdelmahmoud go long, ostensibly making himself the focus of his lavish eye, is a joy...And yet, along with the ups come the doleful insights that are inseparable from a truly vulnerable memoir of this nature...To borrow a phrase from Twitter – on which Abdelmahmoud is a warm and reasonable presence – he is as open about his Ls as he is his Ws...\'Elsewhere is not a land, but a sharp edge you inhabit,\' he writes...Along that sharp edge, Abdelmahmoud hones his humour, his heart, his abiding love for the country he left behind, as well as the troubled nation in which he came of age...There is an art to being two people at once: seeing oneself through the eyes of the dominant social forces while also seeing through that fiction...Son of Elsewhere is about Elamin being born, over and over again, to awareness...It is where elsewhere has consistently delivered him, whether he wanted it or not.
