When Nuruddin Farah writes fiction about the ravages of terrorism, the details may be imaginary but the scars are real. 

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"North of Dawn” is a story we rarely hear, a tale concerning the terrorist’s family that takes place in the long shadow of grief, shame and twisted loyalty. It’s also a story pulsing with the adrenaline of our era: a toxic mix of zealotry and xenophobia.

It’s not hard to imagine that Farah, who currently lives in South Africa, has infused the protagonist of this novel with his own dismay. Mugdi is a Somali who "detests Somalia’s dysfunction.” He’s a foreign-born resident who fears his host country’s growing intolerance. He’s a spiritual man who has lost his faith in organized religion, though "the ringing of the muezzin stirs memories within him.”

As the novel opens, Mugdi is thrust into the awkward role of welcoming a daughter-in-law poisoned by the same radicalism that turned his son into a killer. She arrives from a refugee camp in a state of terrified bewilderment, fully cloaked, unwilling to speak to him — or any man — directly. Even before they’ve left the Oslo airport, we can see the clash of secular and religious values that will confound this awkward new family. When Mugdi asks her to fasten her seat belt, she announces: "We’ll die on the day that Allah has ordained for us to die, whether we wear this thing or not.” The test of wills has just begun.

"North of Dawn” is bracingly honest about the difficulties of assimilation, the way hospitality curdles into condescension and gratitude sours into resentment. Mugdi and his wife are extraordinarily generous toward their daughter-in-law, a young woman named Waliya, but Mugdi expects her to reciprocate by going to language classes, finding a job and becoming a productive member of Western society. Waliya, for her part, remains unwilling to do anything that might contaminate her. Alarmed by the permissive culture of Norway, she’s intensely alienated from her new home and determined to cling to her conservative practice of Islam ever more fiercely.

But for Farah, Muslim radicalism is not a problem in isolation. It’s merely one side of the coin of intolerance that’s gaining currency in liberal democracies. "We are caught,” a friend tells Mugdi, "between a small group of Nazi-inspired vigilantes and a small group of radical jihadis claiming to belong to a purer strain of Islam.” His wife agrees: "We must all beware of provocateurs, no matter their allegiances, who are enemies to the nation at large and of peace everywhere.”

This is such a timely, necessary argument, but I wish it were expressed more gracefully in these pages. "North of Dawn” suffers from a ramshackle quality one might expect from an exciting but not quite finished draft. There are strange gaps in the plot, and the prose sometimes slips into antique cliches. Confronted by an aggressive woman at his front door, Mugdi suspects "that she has cased the joint.” Another character "moves like greased lightning and is at the cafe huffing and puffing.” And Farah’s characters sometimes speak in weirdly artificial ways. A teenage girl says to her boyfriend, "Nothing would give me more joy than to come with you and to make their acquaintance” — a remark that would sound more natural in a Regency romance.