Edgelands
A Life on Society's Margins
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Remove from Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
Edgelands
Pre-order for $31.70
-
Narrated by:
About this listen
Somali, Muslim, gay, and three times an immigrant, Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali has always existed in a fraught state of transience. He has been forced across several borders, both geographical and personal, from being kidnapped by his father at the age of five to narrowly escaping an arranged marriage at nineteen. He subsequently became a substance abuser with no permanent address, and finally a university graduate and writer.
In Edgelands, Ali excavates these acute points of transience in his life to seek places, both internal and external, where he could belong. The library became a space through which his family’s history unfurled itself to him, forcing reckonings with his racialized body and the role it is coerced to play in North American society. Walks through the city’s fringe neighbourhoods prompted radical reimaginings of what the plaques and monuments dotting these streets truly memorialize. And Ali’s drug dependency, in all its glittering, insidious entrapments, served also to open doors into a world of freedom, beauty, and terror, of true queer expression as well as its unseen costs.
From his perch at the margins of society and with clear-eyed and rhythmic writing, Ali combines a trenchant personal history with penetrating social criticism, and asks profound questions about identity, displacement, and the geography of belonging in our increasingly complex, globalized world.
Critic Reviews
“In Edgelands, Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali searches for his village while navigating houselessness, addiction and toxic family dynamics, told from the perspective of an author who refuses to play the model minority. An audacious dispatch from the fringes of society, Edgelands will remain in the forefront of my mind.” —Catherine Hernandez, author and screenwriter of Scarborough the book and film
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.