The Names That Travel

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.