Excerpt from The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'Take some.' Nasra holds out the bottle.

Deqo squirts a tiny amount into her palm and returns the bottle. The scent of the lotion, the razor blade and the myriad jars of perfume on the dresser seem to express the metamorphosis from little girl to woman, the necessary grooming and management demanded by a body grown large and wild. She rubs her hands together and puts them to her nose, the lotion's scent is overwhelmed by soap, charcoal, bread and sweat.

Nasra rips the towels from her head and body and stands in all her splendour before the wardrobe. Deqo averts her eyes, but the difference between Nasra's solid thighs and backside and Karl Marx's makes her want to look again and check how a grown woman is meant to be; to see how many changes her own body will undertake.

'You slept well?' Nasra flicks through the folded piles spilling out of the wardrobe.

'Yes,' Deqo replies enthusiastically, despite the fact she barely closed her eyes.

'Good. Maybe you will stay with us then.' Nasra dresses, choosing her clothes carefully. 'You have to tell me if you need anything. I want you fat and happy, understood? I want you to be my little girl.'

'Yes, Nasra,' Deqo smiles broadly.

'Have you ever seen the sea?'

'Never.'

'I will take you to Berbera one day, to see my family.'

'What's it like there?'

'The same as Hargeisa but with the sea next to it, and fishermen selling their catch on the beach and Yemenis touting qudar, a kind of date drink, and my mother with her scissors cutting my hair every month.' Nasra smiles.

She turns on the stereo and then changes the cassette, searching through tape after tape, declaring the provenance of each as if she is a radio presenter: Indian, Arabic, Congolese and American. Deqo cannot tell them apart but likes them all; the room suddenly feels crowded and animated by invisible musicians, singers and dancers. Nasra finds a Somali song and then settles back on the unmade bed, a photo album in her hands. She flicks through it; the photographs have the texture of distant, half-forgotten memories behind the opaque paper and Nasra's smile fades.

Deqo looks over her shoulder at the images: bare-footed young girls playing in the surf, a hard-faced matriarch glowering in front of a savannah studio backdrop, a thin, wild-haired man standing proudly in front of a white boat.

'Who is that?' Deqo jabs a finger at the photo.

Nasra wipes away the greasy mark left on the film before answering, 'My father.'

'Is he a fisherman?'

'He was.' She turns the page quickly and skims through the other photographs without really seeming to see them.

'I don't know who or what my father was,' Deqo says with a nervous giggle. She tries to place an arm on Nasra's shoulder and then thinks better of it.

'You're from the camps, aren't you?'

'Yes, Saba'ad.'

'Well, he was probably a poor nomad then, and your mother a long-haired sultan's daughter from a village by a river, and they met and ran away together for love and had you. Is that right?' Nasra jumps from the bed and shoves the album in a drawer.

Deqo almost purrs with delight; Nasra's story fills her with light and warmth. 'Yes! Yes! Yes!' she wants to shout, but she just swings her arms instead.

The truth is so brutal in contrast. She has no knowledge at all of where the rest of her family are; there are no stories passed on by cousins, no villages to return to, no genealogy to pass on if she ever has children of her own. She

Copyright © 2013 by Nadifa Mohamed