This striking, original book takes us from the deeply personal record of Susan Brind Morrow's childhood in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, to her work and wanderings in the deserts of Egypt and Sudan.

The Names of Things interweaves a moving American memoir with an adventurous woman's search for the birth of language. Using dense, turbulent Cairo as a base, Brind Morrow lives for months at a time with nomads in the remote Red Sea Hills, sleeping on the ground, sharing their food, their camps, their language, and their intimate connection with the natural world.

It becomes almost incidental that she's a woman traveling alone in an Arab country; that she has numerous dicey moments with the Sudanese border police; that her Russian jeep breaks down repeatedly in empty stretches of the desert; that the impetus for her travel is recovery from the deaths of both a brother and a sister. Brind Morrow leaves the conventions of travel writing behind and plunges us into another way of experiencing the world.