Before the Winter Ends, Khadro Mohamed
Tender Press, 2025

The entire courtyard is bathed in bright orange. Omar feels
a prickling in his eyes and he lets tears fall. His mother is
rubbing her soil-stained fingers together when she turns to him.
Her eyes have grown soft. Instead of saying anything, because
there is nothing she can say, she reaches across the space between
them and grips his hand. His grandmother calls for them in the
distance. The Adan rings across the houses.

from Before the Winter Ends

Khadro Mohamed’s debut novel, Before the Winter Ends, is the kind of novel that sticks to you in vital ways. For me, it is a complete and utterly satisfying narrative package. Khadro writes with her poet’s ear attuned to the flow of the sentences (her debut poetry collection We’re All Made of Lightning won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards). Oh yes, and Tender Press have a done an excellent production job!

I love this book. I love this book so very much.

This year I am drawn to novels that are written in ink that is musical, with sonic rewards multiple. I am drawn to characters that fold and unfold into the plains and mountains and valleys of human experience. Khadro’s characters, particularly the protagonist Omar and his family, draw me deep, oh so very deep into humanity, with their various connections to past and present and future.

I am drawn into the physical world, so present in illuminating detail. Physical scenes alive with detail, with food, the wafting flavours and preparation and customs and associations. And most importantly, the movement between places, between Wellington, Egypt and Somalia. And this movement, geographical, familial, these attachments and displacements, feel as relevant to today, as they were in the 1999 and 2019 of the novel’s narrative.

Omar is a struggling university student in Wellington. He lives with his mother, Asha, who is ill. He hangs out with his uni buddy, Nick. He speaks on the phone to his grandmother in Egypt. He has rarely talked to his aunt Fardowsa who has lived in multiple African cities. He can’t stop thinking about his enigma father, Yasser, who went missing in war-plagued Mogadishu of 1999 and is a persistent and troubling gap. Omar is learning Arabic and Somalian. He is sitting in his science lab with a lost-in-the-bush feeling, tuning out, wanting to set fire to his afro, and by the end of class:

“The bush fire in Omar’s mind has eased to a single flame by the end of the lab. He welcomes it but tries to ignore the scorched landscape left in its wake.”

Before the Winter Ends is in three parts. Part 1, Wellington in 2019, introduces Omar and Asha with connections and misconnections. Part 2, in Cairo, Egypt and in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1999, returns to the meeting of his parents. Part 3, is Cairo in 2019 when Asha and Omar go to to see his grandmother and aunt. It’s his first visit. And there’s a small final section that returns to Mogadishu Somalia.

This novel is one you hold to your heart with its mesh of grief and silence and challenge, its currents of distance and intimacy and epiphany.

We learn more about Asha in the second part. The Asha buried inside the ill woman in Wellington. How this moved me, as I stretch out to women’s struggles across time and place. Asha makes sacrifices to be a wife, to be alone at home, she who had dreams of teaching Somali literature, and there’s her husband Yasser heading out the door to the library. When she asks for mint, Yasser buys her pomegranates. His empty sorry, a hollow echo. And sorry becomes an ache refrain. The seeing and not been seen. Language and dream buried deep in her tongue and heart and mind. This precious pregnant woman who travels to Wellington to nourish new life tendrils.

This is heart reading. This is making me care so deeply about this young man. This mother. About where and how to be in the knife-edge, war-smashed world we inhabit.

This is a novel on being seen and seeing. On the need to be seen. On the self-restoring act of seeing.

This a novel on saying and being said. On not being able to say what is reached for, struggled for, deflated by, exhausted by. On being able to. On being able to say.

This is also a novel on healing, on navigating the paths ahead.

Read this precious novel. Let it settle under your skin and travel with you, as together we navigate the roads ahead, the roads behind, and with heart to heart, the roads we share and stand upon, reading, writing, speaking, doing, listening.

Khadro Mohamed is a writer and poet living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. She’s originally from Somalia and has a deep connection with her whakapapa, which is often a huge source of inspiration for her poetry. Her poetry has appeared in online magazines such as: Starling, Salient Magazine, Pantograph Punch, Poetry Shelf, The Spinoff and more. Her debut poetry collection, We’re All Made of Lightning (Tender Press, 2022), won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards.

Tender Press page

A poem on Poetry Shelf: ‘If I Go Back’