Edgelands
A Life on Society’s Margins
a memoir by Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali
(Photo: Philip Sutherland)
FROM THE AUTHOR OF ANGRY QUEER SOMALI BOY: A COMPLICATED MEMOIR COMES A NEW BOOK THAT OFFERS A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
Edgelands: The apparently unplanned, certainly uncelebrated and largely incomprehensible territory where town and country meet and rarely forms the settings for films, books or television shows…. Sometimes these area are so little acknowledged that they have not even been given distinctive names.
They are the “ignored landscape.”
— Marion Shoard, Edgelands
Who gets to be in the city and who gets to tell its stories? In Edgelands: A Life on Society’s Margins, Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali sets out to answer these questions and many more in an effort to offer a better understanding of the urban world by using his own experiences and education in urban planning as starting points. As a person who has been forced across several borders, both geographical and personal, Ali is intrigued by the way we choose to live amongst and beside each other. Through a series of personal tales, he takes us from his kidnapping by his father in Somalia at age 5 in 1990 to his reunion with his mother in Minneapolis thirty years later. His story brings us a unique perspective on the way we live now.
ALSO AVAILABLE:
MONA, OR THE SPAN OF MY UNCERTAIN YEARS: A NOVEL
Mona is the name of a crossdresser who was born a boy named Mahdi. She hails from the Somali community and is found dead in her apartment surrounded by upturned furniture. The police declare it a suicide but her friend, Bilal, knows Mona wouldn’t kill herself. As he clears out her apartment, he comes across a stack of notebooks. In them he finds descriptions of a person he doesn’t recognize. The notebooks reveal Mona’s descent into a world of sadomasochism and her evolution as a crossdresser. They reveal the names of people Bilal goes in search of in order to better understand what happened to his friend. The novel asks us to think about how revenge and desire can often blind us to what is right. How can we come out on the right side of events when our honour or dignity has been impugned?
Read an excerpt
See all author’s titles
70,000 words
Manuscript available November 2025
RIGHTS SOLD
Canada: Knopf Canada, August 2026
ABOUT MOHAMED ABDULKARIM ALI
Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali, born in Mogadishu, Somalia, is a survivor. He survived civil war, a shattered family, dislocations, abuse, homelessness, addiction and alcoholism. He wrote his first book, Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir, which was selected as one of the best works of non-fiction to come in 2019 by CBC Books, while living in a homeless shelter. He currently lives in Minneapolis.
PRAISE FOR MOHAMED ABDULKARIM ALI'S ANGRY QUEER SOMALI BOY: A COMPLICATED MEMOIR
“Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali is a remarkable writer.” — THE GLOBE AND MAIL, “Ten recent books on racism in Canada and the U.S.”
“One of “The Best LGBTQ Memoirs of 2019.” — THE ADVOCATE
“Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali has been through a lot since he was born almost 35 years ago in Mogadishu, Somalia. A ruinous civil war; migrating to the Netherlands and then to Canada, a Muslim in a strange land; a fractured family; discovering he was gay; homelessness, alcoholism and addiction. You might say that anyone who's lived through all that should write a memoir. That's what he did. It's called Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir, and it was widely acclaimed as one of the best Canadian books of 2019.”— CBC BOOKS