Son of Elsewhere
A Memoir in Pieces
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Narrated by:
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Elamin Abdelmahmoud
About this listen
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
From one of the most beloved media personalities of his generation comes a one-of-a-kind reflection on Blackness, faith, language, pop culture, and the challenges and rewards of finding your way in the world.
Professional wrestling super fandom, Ontario's endlessly unfurling 401 highway, late nights at the convenience store listening to heavy metal—for writer and podcast host Elamin Abdelmahmoud, these are the building blocks of a life. Son of Elsewhere charts that life in wise, funny, and moving reflections on the many threads that weave together into an identity.
Arriving in Canada at age 12 from Sudan, Elamin's teenage years were spent trying on new ways of being in the world, new ways of relating to his almost universally white peers. His is a story of yearning to belong in a time and place where expectation and assumptions around race, faith, language, and origin make such belonging extremely difficult, but it's also a story of the surprising and unexpected ways in which connection and acceptance can be found.
In this extraordinary debut collection, the process of growing—of trying, failing, and trying again to fit in—is cast against the backdrop of the memory of life in a different time, and different place—a Khartoum being bombed by the United States, a nation seeking to define and understand itself against global powers of infinite reach.
Taken together, these essays explore how we pick and choose from our experience and environment to help us in the ongoing project of defining who we are—how, for instance, the example of Mo Salah, the profound grief practices of Islam, the nerdy charm of The O.C.'s Seth Cohen, and the long shadow of colonialism can cohere into a new and powerful whole.
With the perfect balance of relatable humor and intellectual ferocity, Son of Elsewhere confronts what we know about ourselves, and most important, what we’re still learning.
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Critic reviews
“It is astounding how accurately and honestly Elamin Abdelmahmoud manages to map the strange territory between cultures that so many migrants call home. The interlinked essays in this collection, which filter the immigrant experience through everything from country music to professional-wrestling fan fiction, manage to pull off a rare trick—at once sincere, ironic, hilarious, and profound. Son of Elsewhere is the sort of book that can only come from a writer both incisive and open-hearted. Abdelmahmoud, to our great fortune, is both.” (Omar El Akkad, Scotiabank Giller Prize‒winning author of What Strange Paradise and American War)
“Son Of Elsewhere is a memoir that is immense in its desire to give, and not just of its writer's life and history. But it is also a rich offering of image, of music, of place. I am thankful for the touchable nature of this story, the movements within the book, and how visual this journey is.” (Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance)
“Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s Son of Elsewhere achieves what all nonfiction work should: a unique type of universality. His writing feels like a magic trick: every page is charming, funny, and yet painful, a collection that presses on your most tender feelings like a bruise yet to heal. Son of Elsewhere is a salve.” (Scaachi Koul, author of One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter)
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By: Ron Suskind
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How Dare the Sun Rise
- Memoirs of a War Child
- By: Sandra Uwiringiyimana, Abigail Pesta
- Narrated by: Sandra Uwiringiyimana
- Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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This profoundly moving memoir is the remarkable and inspiring true story of Sandra Uwiringiyimana, a girl from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who tells the tale of how she survived a massacre, immigrated to America, and overcame her trauma through art and activism. Sandra was just 10 years old when she found herself with a gun pointed at her head. She had watched as rebels gunned down her mother and six-year-old sister in a refugee camp.
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Sandra's voice is mesmorizing!
- By Karissa Barber on 04-18-18
By: Sandra Uwiringiyimana, and others
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The Gift of Our Wounds
- A Sikh and a Former White Supremacist Find Forgiveness After Hate
- By: Pardeep Singh Kaleka, Arno Michaelis, Robin Gaby Fisher
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne, John McLain
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When white supremacist Wade Michael Page murdered six people and wounded four in a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin in 2012, Pardeep Kaleka was devastated. The temple leader, now dead, was his father. His family, who had immigrated to the US from India when Pardeep was young, had done everything right. Why was this happening to him? Arno Michaelis, a former skinhead and founder of one of the largest racist skinhead organizations in the world, knew he had to take action and fight against the very crimes he used to commit.
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The Gift
- By M. Forsberg on 07-29-22
By: Pardeep Singh Kaleka, and others
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Facing the Music
- My Story
- By: Jennifer Knapp
- Narrated by: Jennifer Knapp
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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At the top of her career in the Christian music industry, Jennifer Knapp quit. A few years later, she publicly revealed she is gay. A media frenzy ensued, and many of her former fans were angry with what they saw as turning her back on God. But through it all, she held on to the truth that had guided her from the beginning. In this memoir, she finally tells her story: of her troubled childhood, the love of music that pulled her through, her dramatic conversion to Christianity, her rise to stardom, her abrupt departure from Christian contemporary music....
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I'm a fan. I have a history with Jennifer Knapp.
- By Steve Lee, Sr. on 01-26-23
By: Jennifer Knapp
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Take Me Home
- An Autobiography
- By: John Denver
- Narrated by: John Denver
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Abridged
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In a career that spanned decades, John Denver earned international acclaim as a singer, songwriter, actor, and environmental activist. Songs like "Take Me Home, Country Roads", "Rocky Mountain High", and "Annie's Song" have entered the canon of universal anthems, but at his start John Denver was a young man with little more than a fine voice, a guitar, and a dream. Growing up in a conservative military family, he was not expected to drop out of college and head to Los Angeles, where the music scene was flourishing. Nor was he expected to succeed.
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Loved hearing John Denver telling his story
- By Brenda M. on 02-03-17
By: John Denver
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Cry Like a Man
- Fighting for Freedom from Emotional Incarceration
- By: Jason Wilson
- Narrated by: Damany Jackson
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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His grandfather’s lynching in the deep South, the murders of his two older brothers, and his verbally harsh and absent father all worked together to form Jason Wilson’s childhood. But it was his decision to acknowledge his emotions and yield to God’s call on his life that made Wilson the man and leader he is today. As the founder of one of the country’s most esteemed youth organizations, Wilson explains the dangers men face in our culture’s definition of “masculinity” and gives listeners hope that healing is possible.
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Just a sad story, no useful tips
- By Grzegorz on 08-15-21
By: Jason Wilson
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The Song and the Silence
- A Story About Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright
- By: Yvette Johnson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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"Have to keep that smile", said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time Wright was a waiter in a Whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: Before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the Black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.
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Exceeded every expectation
- By ZeeJ84 on 05-23-21
By: Yvette Johnson
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In the Country We Love
- My Family Divided
- By: Diane Guerrero, Michelle Burford
- Narrated by: Diane Guerrero
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Diane Guerrero, the television actress from the megahit Orange Is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, was just 14 years old on the day her parents were detained and deported while she was at school. Born in the US, Guerrero was able to remain in the country and continue her education, depending on the kindness of family friends who took her in and helped her build a life and a successful acting career for herself, without the support system of her family.
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Moves very slowly
- By Laura S. on 07-23-16
By: Diane Guerrero, and others
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Ordinary Light
- A Memoir
- By: Tracy K. Smith
- Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith
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World Changer: A Mother's Story
- By: Karen Vaughn
- Narrated by: Karen Vaughn
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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On August 6, 2011, 30 American soldiers aboard Extortion 17 perished in the single greatest loss of Navy SEAL lives. Among them - Aaron Carson Vaughn, a small-town boy who grew up in the hills of Tennessee and lived a life larger than most. Told through the eyes of Karen, Aaron's mother, this tender story of faith, family, and love grips the heart and shows how one family raised an American warrior filled with courage, tenacity, and patriotism. The Vaughn's story is not one about war or about a grieving family, but rather one of triumph.
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A wonderful story of patriotism and faith!
- By J. B. on 11-01-17
By: Karen Vaughn
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Born to Run
- By: Bruce Springsteen
- Narrated by: Bruce Springsteen
- Length: 18 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl's halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That's how this extraordinary autobiography began. Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to this audio the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs.
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Me Springsteen's book moved me beyond words...
- By Ellen O'Brien on 12-12-16
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Lose Well
- By: Chris Gethard
- Narrated by: Chris Gethard
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Let’s face it: we all want a seat at the cool table, a great job, and loads of money. But most of us won’t be able to achieve this widely accepted, black-or-white, definition of winning, which makes us feel like failures, that we’re destined to a life of loserdom. That’s the conventional wisdom. It’s also crap, according to comedian and cult hero Chris Gethard, who knows a thing of two about losing. Failing is an art form, he argues; in fact, it’s the only the way we’re ever going to discover who we are, what we really want, and how to live the kind of life we only dreamed about.
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WHAT A LOSER
- By Amazon Customer on 01-26-19
By: Chris Gethard
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Moment Maker
- You Can Live Your Life or It Will Live You
- By: Carlos Whittaker
- Narrated by: Carlos Whittaker
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Life is made of moments. What are you doing to make the most of them? In Moment Maker, Carlos Whittaker shows you how to make each moment count, so those moments add up to a life rich with meaning, deeply satisfying, and full of purpose. Every day we have an opportunity to make our lives meaningful, to make them matter. Yet, for so many of us, we let too much of life happen without taking notice. For author, speaker, and podcaster Carlos Whittaker, living deliberately has become a way of life.
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going to read it again starting now! !Bravo Carlos
- By Eric B. Sichler on 06-02-15
By: Carlos Whittaker
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They Said They Wanted Revolution
- A Memoir of My Parents
- By: Neda Toloui-Semnani
- Narrated by: Neda Toloui-Semnani
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1979, Neda Toloui-Semnani’s parents left the United States for Iran to join the revolution. But the promise of those early heady days in Tehran was warped by the rise of the Islamic Republic. With the new regime came international isolation, cultural devastation, and profound personal loss for Neda. Her father was arrested and her mother was forced to make a desperate escape, pregnant and with Neda in tow.
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I learned so much. Great pacing, felt like I time-traveled
- By Jess Fuchs on 02-07-22
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Divine Alignment
- By: Squire Rushnell
- Narrated by: Squire Rushnell, Louise Duart
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In his charmingly avuncular and wonderfully optimistic voice, SQuire shares moving stories from his own and others' lives to show the awesome strength inherent in what he calls God's positioning system, or GPS. Each of us, he assures listeners, can use our own personal GPS to grow more closely aligned with God to become vastly more effective, successful, and fulfilled in our relationships, our career, and everything we do.
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I loved it. Very interesting.
- By SunShine on 01-24-17
By: Squire Rushnell
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The Whitney I Knew
- By: BeBe Winans, Tim Willard
- Narrated by: BeBe Winans
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is the Whitney only family would know.... Somewhere outside the glare of the concert spotlights...behind the tawdry entertainment news headlines...beyond the crush of the scandal-seeking paparazzi...lies the truth about Whitney Houston. And few individuals are better qualified to show us that complicated, funny, generous, troubled, extremely loyal Whitney than the friend she called "brother", Bebe Winans.
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BeBe's love for Whitney
- By Kyana on 02-22-24
By: BeBe Winans, and others
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Turn Around Bright Eyes
- A Karaoke Love Story
- By: Rob Sheffield
- Narrated by: Rob Sheffield
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Turn Around Bright Eyes picks up Sheffield’s story right after Love Is a Mix Tape. He is a young widower devastated by grief, trying to build a new life in a new town after his wife’s death. As a writer for Rolling Stone, he naturally takes solace in music. But that’s when he discovers the sublime ridiculousness of karaoke, and despite the fact that he can’t carry a tune, he begins to find his voice.
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Witty (sometimes sad) love story/Soundtrack
- By Wally Tonra on 05-07-15
By: Rob Sheffield