Salutation Road delivers a poignant and thought-provoking tale that straddles the line between reality and imagination, identity and displacement.
Sirad Ali is a quiet, introspective girl living in Greenwich, a place that feels more like a cage than a home. Her world is defined by the expectations of others, and her identity is shaped by the shadows of perception. Memories of her birthplace, Somalia, have blurred into abstraction—distant echoes of a life she barely recalls. With the burden of family responsibility weighing heavily on her shoulders, Sirad quietly drifts through a life that doesn’t quite feel like her own.
Then, something extraordinary happens.
Sirad receives an invitation to participate in a mysterious project called Unclassified—a one-day journey into a parallel realm designed for third-culture youth. The aim is to reconnect with their ancestral pasts in an alternate lifetime. What begins as a suspected prank soon morphs into an uncanny reality as she boards a bus from London to Mogadishu.
There, in Somalia, both familiar and utterly foreign, Sirad confronts an alternate version of herself—Ubah. This mirror image is bold, restless, and rebellious, married yet yearning for freedom. Through Ubah, Sirad is forced to face the fragments of a life she left behind, in a city scarred by war but still pulsing with untold stories.
As the two girls’ lives intertwine, Unclassified becomes more than just a journey—it’s a meditation on identity, memory, and the invisible threads that bind us to the past and future. When Ubah chooses to escape her life and board the same bus Sirad arrived on, the consequences ripple across realities, leaving both girls changed in profound, haunting ways.
Despite a few minor narrative loopholes, it is a bold, imaginative debut. The author has crafted rich, multidimensional characters and infused the novel with emotional resonance. It’s a story that lingers long after the final page—one that dares to ask what it means to belong and whether true freedom lies in staying or in the courage to leave.