From one of our most highly acclaimed international writers, Crossbones is a tense and moving portrait of people struggling to sustain their individuality and fragile connections in the face of zealotry, corruption and civil war. An aging Jeebleh has returned to Somalia to visit old friends in his beloved Mogadiscio. He is accompanied by his son-in-law, Malik, a journalist intent on covering the region’s ongoing turmoil. Instead of the chaos Jeebleh remembers from his last visit, however, the two are greeted by an eerie calm, enforced by ubiquitous white-robed figures bearing whips. Soon, Malik’s brother, Ahl, arrives in Puntland, the region notorious as a pirates’ base. Ahl is searching for his stepson, who has vanished from the states, apparently recruited by an imam allied to Somalia’s rising insurgency. As Somalis brace for an Ethiopian invasion, the brothers’ efforts draw them deeper into the fabric of the country. Then the borders are breached, the country’s uneasy quiet shattered, and Malik and Ahl experience firsthand the derailments of war.