Broken Reed is Sophia Mustafa's most recent work, published in the country the author considered her home, Tanzania, shortly after her death in September 2005. She initially began work on the novel in 1947 when she was a refugee from the partition of India in 1947. She worked on the book over the ensuing decades drawing on her experiences of living between East Africa and the Indian sub- continent, finally completing the work in the relative tranquillity of Canada where she lived from 1989.