Published on 6/20/2026
From Al-Rawaq Publishing and Distribution House in Egypt, the novel “The Lemon Tree Family” was published in 365 pages by the Sudanese writer Hamid Al-Nazer, in a new literary work that takes the Sudanese war as a background for its events, but it goes beyond the boundaries of the political and military event to delve into the impact of the war on human memory, and on the cities that are trying to return to life after being overtaken by the disaster.
The novel begins with a seemingly simple question, but it expands to become the question of the entire work: What happens to people after the war ends? Do wars really end when battles stop?
In the world of the novel, Badr al-Din al-Khawaja returns to his home in the eastern Al-Jarif neighborhood in Khartoum after the fighting subsides, awaiting the return of his family, which was separated by the war. However, returning does not give him the certainty he is looking for. The city he knows seems familiar and strange at the same time, and the faces bear traces of what happened, and the places have lost some of their old memory. As he tries to restore his old life, he discovers that what is broken cannot always be repaired by returning alone.
The novel says in one of its key quotes: “War may begin in one mind, but it ends in everyone’s memory,” a phrase that sums up its vision of war as an event that transcends the battlefields and resides for a long time within souls. “The Lemon Tree Family” goes beyond the idea of direct war to tell what happens to a person when he is forced to live on the ruins of his old world.
The viewer goes on to build a fictional world in which realism and exoticism coexist. A hanged girl follows the hero in his dreams, then appears to him in reality. A corpse returns from the dead to propose an unexpected friendship. A love story that seems complete before it begins, and an ending that its owners think has closed its doors permanently before it reappears. Thus, the novel turns into a space in which memory intersects with imagination, truth with illusion, and the present with what has not yet passed.
Through its many characters, the novel approaches themes of love, loss, family, violence, identity, and art, and also contemplates the meaning of survival itself. Who really survived? Is he the one who left the war and returned to his home, or the one who remained stuck inside it even after it ended?
Hamid Al-Nazer is considered one of the most prominent Sudanese novelist voices in recent years. Readers have known him through novels that received wide critical acclaim, including “The Prophecy of Al-Saqqa,” “The Black Peacock,” and “Two Green Eyes,” all of which reached the long list of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. He also published the novel “The Woodcutters – A Non-Autobiography of the Gatekeeper,” the short story collection “Year of the Dog,” and the book “The Clothesline.” In addition to his literary activity, Al-Nazer works as a news broadcaster on Arab TV in Doha after a media career that spanned more than 30 years.
In “The Lemon Tree Family,” Al-Nazer continues his preoccupation with humanity in moments of great transformation, presenting a novel about Khartoum, but it is also a novel about any city from which the war emerged and whose effects remain in everything. in
