Coloured Lights Leila Aboulela Polygon, 149pp, £8.99 ISBN 0748662987
These stories by the inaugural winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing are about states of transition, about various encounters between Islam and the west. All Leila Aboulela's Muslim characters - recent immigrants, some British and born to Muslim parents, others converts to the faith - discover a sense of direction through religion, made stronger through feelings of displacement. One woman, on looking in the mirror, feels that she has "left her looks behind" in Africa; another that her life in England is unreal, little more than a state of limbo. One man, a Muslim student, attempts to reject his cultural inheritance, only to find himself envious of his wife, who, loyal to her faith, remains "displaced, yet intact". Aboulela's portrayal of her British protagonists - a reclusive student, a promiscuous female teenager, a wife afraid of travelling to Africa - can be read as oversimplified representations of a stereotypical immoral western culture. Yet the appeal of these stories lies less in their familiar themes than in their fresh, unpretentious language. The stories move so briskly that we receive only fleeting glimpses of people's lives, but they are intimate all the same - impressions of alienation and the strength of spirituality.
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