A handful of books help make sense of Sudan, its capital, and the long arc of Mahdist, colonial, and independent history.
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih. A short, devastating novel about a Sudanese man returning home from London, set partly in a village on the Nile north of Khartoum. Widely considered the most important Arabic novel of the 20th century and the best introduction to Sudanese sensibility.
The River War by Winston Churchill. Churchill served as a young cavalry officer in Kitchener's 1898 reconquest of Sudan and produced a long, vivid account of the Mahdist war that culminated in the Battle of Omdurman. The prose is grand and the imperial perspective unflinching — a window into Victorian Britain as much as into Sudan.
Khartoum by Michael Asher. A fast-paced account of the 1884-1885 siege and General Gordon's death, drawing heavily on Mahdist sources to balance the British version. The best single book for a traveller standing on the Republican Palace steps.
God's Spies by Stephen Talty. A non-fiction reconstruction of the Mahdist uprising told largely through the eyes of the captives held in Omdurman, including the Austrian missionary Joseph Ohrwalder. Reads like a thriller.
Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile by James Bruce. The 18th-century Scotsman's swaggering account of his journey to find the Blue Nile's source. Bruce passed through what is now Khartoum a century before the modern city existed and his descriptions of the region remain a great period piece.