Travelling with Djinns

By turns hilarious and unbearably poignant, Travelling with Djinns is the bitter-sweet story of a father and son on the road to discovering their place in the cultural and genetic soup of modern Europe. Yasin is driving through Europe in a dilapidated Peugeot 504 with his seven-year-old son, Leo. He’s not sure where they’re going. He just knows he’s thirty-seven years old, his wife is about to divorce him and this is his last chance to explain to his son who he is and where he comes from. The problem is that Yasin isn’t sure of the answer to these questions himself. Born in the Sudan to an English mother and an Arab father, he has two passports but no national identity. When he met his English wife, Ellen, he thought that love could transcend borders. Now, he is coming to see that, wherever you travel, you take your past with you. As he and Leo drift through Germany to Paris in search of Europe’s history, and onwards through Provence to Spain to find Yasin’s ex-lover and lost brother, Yasin reflects on the tragic-comic ironies of his displaced life and the kind of mixed-up world his son will inhabit. When they finally wash up on the Costa Brava, he and Leo are on the verge of separation but the brink of understanding.