Critical Praise

"The True Sources of the Nile is as rich and complicated as life itself. Few writers can pull off what Sarah Stone manages triumphantly: an intricate tapestry in which joy and love lie side by side with horror and injustice, each strand convincing and clear yet the whole beautifully blended. This is a dazzling novel."

——Andrea Barrett, National Book Award—winning author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal

"The True Sources of the Nile is a vibrant, sensual, moving portrayal of a country in crisis and a heroine in conflict. Sarah Stone has a wonderful gift for conjuring both characters and landscapes on the page. This is a splendid and engrossing novel."

——Margot Livesey, author of The Missing World and Eva Moves the Furniture

"Sarah Stone writes in a supple, lyrical style about matters of life and death in this novel, and at its heart the book is about people who will not tell–will not admit–what they know to be true. At once a passionate love story and an accounting of political warfare in Africa, The True Sources of the Nile manages to show how closely allied terror and love can sometimes be. Few Americans have witnessed the terrible and beautiful lives of Africans as closely as this narrator has, and as a result this book is hard to put down and impossible to forget."

——Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love

"Sarah Stone has written a novel of civil and domestic war, of tribal and familial violence–all the more passionate because intermingled: love and death flailing at each other like the pair at the erotically charged center of The True Sources of the Nile. Whether she writes of San Francisco or Burundi, checkups or checkpoints, nightmares or dreams, she does so with authority and in prose honed machete-edged sharp: a vivid, heart-stopping tale."

——Nicholas Delbanco, author of What Remains and Old Scores