The Names That Travel

By Samme Bogad

When Ayaan, a Swedish-Somali journalist, begins tracing an old family legend about a blue bowl, two keys, and an ancestor said to have carried a giraffe to the court of a Chinese emperor, she expects a story.

Instead, she finds names, debts, vanished rooms and carefully guarded silences stretching from Mogadishu to London - and back toward a fifteenth-century Indian Ocean voyage.

Moving between Sa'id's journey in 1417 and Ayaan's present-day search through archives, family testimony and inherited objects, The Names That Travel follows what happens when family memory meets the limits of documentary proof.

A literary historical mystery about migration, inheritance, and the stories that survive when evidence cannot tell us everything.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9198860968
• ISBN13: 9789198860962
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Borderless Africa Books, an imprint of Globalbit AB
• Length: 462 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.2" x 6.0"