[1][2] In 2009, her story Isolation won the Tayeb Salih Creative Writing Award for young writers and was published both in Arabic, as well as in a French and English translation.

In his article on the topic of estrangement in modern Sudanese literature, translator and editor of The Book of Khartoum, Max Shmookler characterizes the story's "descriptions of the lone narrator and the desolate, dystopian town in which he finds himself" as "written in a tight, clipped prose, stripped of the poetic devices of meter, assonance, alliteration, and lexical coupling that give Arabic its particular aural appeal.

[5] In a review in Arabic, the cultural Internet magazine Geel gadeed characterized this novel like this: "Reading Sabah Sanhouri’s works; for me, is a risky journey, like entering an abandoned children's park in a city where a nuclear reactor has exploded.

The story's almost endless string of suicides has been interpreted as the search for the meaning of life, and fellow Sudanese writer Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin wrote about it: “I couldn't tear myself away from the strange world of Paradise, with its characters standing on the brink of death as they slide of their own free will into a dark abyss, into a hell that their minds imagine to be heaven, sold to them by an agency as an illusion of eternal salvation.

[12] For September 11, 2022, the International Literature Festival Berlin announced her participation again, this time together with the writer Stella Gaitano from South Sudan.