NEW RELEASE
The White Mosque
A historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic record of a journey through Uzbekistan and the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity.
In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return.
Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey, but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. Named Ak Metchet, “The White Mosque,” after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village lasted for fifty years.
In pursuit of this curious history, Samatar discovers a variety of characters whose lives intersect around the ancient Silk Road, from a fifteenth-century astronomer-king, to an intrepid Swiss woman traveler of the 1930s, to the first Uzbek photographer, and explores such topics as Central Asian cinema, Mennonite martyrs, and Samatar’s own complex upbringing as the daughter of a Swiss-Mennonite and a Somali-Muslim, raised as a Mennonite of color in America.
A secular pilgrimage to a lost village and a near-forgotten history, The White Mosque traces the porous and ever-expanding borders of identity, asking: How do we enter the stories of others? And how, out of the tissue of life, with its weird incidents, buried archives, and startling connections, does a person construct a self?
Winner
2023 Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir
Finalist
2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
“Voluptuous with imagery and lush with language, this gorgeous memoir of travel and discovery is a perfect summer read . . . Filled with lyrical meditations on faith and community, plus beautiful descriptions of Uzbekistan, Samatar has created something almost transcendent . . . [Her] writing is engaging, enticing, and a gift. This is not only a great book but also an important one. Not to be missed.”
— Library Journal (starred review)
“Samatar’s prose . . . has all the sensory pleasure of an illuminated manuscript . . . The White Mosque is a Rubik’s cube of a book—a memoir but also an intricately researched cultural history and a work of theory.”
— Fransiska Lee, Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism
“The term memoir doesn’t seem capacious enough to capture what Samatar has achieved with her latest: This book is simultaneously a deep study of faith, identity, art, and the enduring power of stories. It is a grand achievement, and with it, Samatar has cemented her status as one of our most alluring and essential thinkers.”
— Tope Folarin, Vulture
“Samatar’s mind is a marvel in this book; it has an expansive way of making connections between seemingly unconnected bits of history both cultural and personal . . . This is an important book for those of us who find ourselves in the liminal spaces between two religions or races, two ways of being, and two cultures.”
— Cate Desjardins, Englewood Review of Books
“Sofia Samatar's encyclopedic imagination, her voracious intensity towards literature, her luminous poetic voice, her attunement to the uncanniness and ghosts of history finds her in company with Olga Tokarczuk, W.G. Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges, and Maria Stepanova. The White Mosque may be her magnum opus. A mosaic that both shatters and illuminates, this 'palimpsestic quest' beams light on a neglected chapter of history. GIVE THIS BOOK ALL OF THE PRIZES.”
— Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts
“An expansive voyage worth taking.”
— Tobias Carroll, InsideHook, The 10 Best Books of 2022
“She is a writer's writer. There is sweetness and color and shade. There is the collision and confrontation with various histories past, moments present. There is the shattering of shimmer and the mosaic of a lived life—lives past and gone that created a way for her breath and becoming . . . All this sensed in the movement that Mennonites traversed towards the end of their world, movements that produce religious convergences and confluences. Is your life a pilgrimage, a journey, a wandering? Reading The White Mosque sets the stage for this kind of thinking, this line of questioning, urgent and necessary and present to take the breath away.”
— Ashon Crawley, author of The Lonely Letters
“The White Mosque is a text of immense richness, complexity, and beauty. Tracing the Silk Road journey of 19th century Mennonites into central Asia and written with poetic grace, Sofia Samatar finds and marks out innumerable parallel paths across time, space, literatures, and histories, including her own personal story.”
— John Keene, author of Counternarratives
“In the end Samatar abandoned any precise formula for moving neatly into and out of others’ stories. Instead she built something far more alive: this extravagance of branches and threads and gleaming details, bursting with the kind of treasures yielded only by boundless curiosity.”
— Megan Milks, 4Columns
“A brilliant quest narrative like none you've ever read. The White Mosque is a passionately researched memoir-helix, written by a genius of genre, and composed of strands of other histories twisted with Samatar's own. As with all her books, one imagines Sofia Samatar emerging from the scene of its creation like a victor having wrestled questions and forces we are too timid, or not-equipped, to face on our own. Samatar conducts epic battles for her books—to make them real and to give form to what, before we read it, would have seemed impossible to imagine. The result is a work of profound scholarship and kaleidoscopic beauty.”
— Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
“This is a writer for whom the immediate experience of the present consists of uncanny opposites and contradictions: intimacy and distance, the familiar and the foreign . . . What makes The White Mosque an important book, however, is that its eclecticism and intellectual restlessness are fine-tuned for the purposes of cultural intervention.”
— Safa Khatib, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Brilliant . . . The book is a stylistic feat. Every sentence sings, and its structure is as unpredictable as its premises . . . The White Mosque is not only a masterful excavation of religious and familial identity, it is also a powerful cure for literary nihilism.”
— Elizabeth Hall, Full Stop
“Complex and gorgeously written, this memoir invites readers on a journey to the ever expanding borders of human compassion.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The White Mosque’s craft is exquisite. Every word is the right one. It reaffirms my belief in the power of writing.”
— Daniel Shank Cruz, Mennonite Life
“An enthralling memoir.”
— Laura Zornosa, Time Best Books of the Month
“A digressive, evocative, and lyrical mosaic.”
— New York Public Library Best Books of 2022
“Fascinating . . . In evocative prose, Samatar captures the Odyssean sojourn and awakens the stories of the past—painting in harrowing detail the unspeakable horrors that befell the first settlers—while reckoning with her own identity . . . A vivid mosaic that interrogates the spirit of the faithful while celebrating the beauty of storytelling. This riveting meditation on the 'great tides of history' yields a wondrous take on the ways the past and present intertwine.”
“This is a perfect memoir: a mosaic (or as Samatar calls it, 'a shattering') of self that elevates the genre of nonfiction to new heights, and an exploration of what it means to stand in the illuminated intersection of history and identity, and bring precise language to the diffuse and unknowable. It is my dearest hope that this book brings Sofia Samatar into the wider public consciousness, something we have not earned, but which she so very richly deserves.”
— Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
“Few of us can match her education in contemporary Mennonite identity. None of us can make those issues more universal, poetic and prophetic.”
— Shirley Showalter, Anabaptist World
“[The White Mosque] spotlights dizzying fractals of unpredictable humanity . . . A road map to sanctuary in an era shadowed by displacement and loss.”
— John Domini, Los Angeles Times
“Visionary, expansive, and wise, Samatar’s exploration stands unparalleled in Mennonite literature and unique among all the new, fine books about identity. Read it and see why the forgotten details of history matter, and how writing can redeem real lives.”
— Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields
“There are very few contemporary writers—if any—who can match Sofia Samatar's kaleidoscopic inventiveness and wonderful wild. She is a genius and The White Mosque is the most mesmeric book I've read in years.”
— Diriye Osman, author of Fairy Tales for Lost Children and The Butterfly Jungle
“The White Mosque is a luminous, brilliant gaze into some of our most profound questions about identity, inheritance, and all that we carry forward as we move through this world. Page after page, Samatar writes with electrifying beauty, treading that fine balance between lush metaphor, philosophical evocation and unwavering clarity. This is a spellbinding, riveting book.”
— Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King