Abdulrazak Gurnah

"From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a sweeping, multi-generational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the brutal colonization of east Africa. When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza too, is...

One day, long before the troubles, he slipped away without saying a word to anyone and never went back. And then another day, forty-three years later, he collapsed just inside the front door of his house in a small English town. It was late in the day when it happened, on his way home after work, but it was also late in the day altogether. He had left things for too long and there was no one to blame for it but himself.
Abbas has never...

By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

'Demands to be read and reread, for its humour, generosity of spirit and clear-sighted vision' Evening Standard

'Gurnah zooms in on individual acts of violence ... and unexpected acts of kindness' Daily Telegraph
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Demoralised by small persecutions and the squalor and...

The debut novel by the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

Vehement, comic and shrewd, Abdulrazak Gurnah's first novel is an unwavering contemplation of East African coastal life
Poverty and depravity wreak havoc on Hassan Omar's family. Amid great hardship he decides to escape.
The arrival of independence brings new upheavals as well as the betrayal of the promise of freedom. The new government, fearful...

"A "corrosively funny and relentless" (The New York Times) tale of cultural identity and displacement, Admiring Silence is the story of a man's dual lives as a refugee from his native Zanzibar in England. The unnamed narrator of this dazzling novel thinks, as he escapes from Zanzibar, that he will probably never return, and yet the dream of studying in England matters above that. Things do not happen quite as he imagined - the school where he teaches...

Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island's white sands obscuring the memory of recent conflict--the longed-for independence from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his father moves out, retreating into...