Shortlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A dazzling debut
novel-within-a-novel in the vein of The Prophets and Memorial about a young author writing
about the secret love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl-in which Mohammed's story
collides with his own blending fact and fiction. In 1919 Mohammed el Adl the young Egyptian
lover of British author E. M. Forster spent six months in a jail cell. A century later Kip
Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons
of Poland Spring to write Mohammed's story. Kip has only three weeks until his publisher's
deadline to immerse himself in the mind of Mohammed who like Kip is Black queer an Other.
The similarities don't end there. Both of their lives have been deeply affected by their
confrontations with Whiteness homophobia their upper crust education and their white
romantic partners. As Kip immerses himself in his writing Mohammed's story - and then Mohammed
himself - begins to speak to him and his life becomes a Proustian portal into Kip's own
memories and psyche. Greenland seamlessly conjures two distinct yet overlapping worlds where
the past mirrors the present and the artist's journey transforms into a quest for truth that
offers a world of possibility. Electric and unforgettable David Santos Donaldson's tour de
force excavates the dream of white assimilation the foibles of interracial relationships and
not only the legacy of a literary giant but literature itself.
