Abdulrazak Gurnah
1) Afterlives
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Best of 2022 - (WPL-ADULT)
New Reads
OBD 100 Notable Books of 2022 New York Times Book Review - Adult
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New Reads
OBD 100 Notable Books of 2022 New York Times Book Review - Adult
More Lists...
Formats
Description
"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...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A powerful story of exile, migration, and betrayal, from the Booker Prize–shortlisted author of Paradise.
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...
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...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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...
Abbas has never...
4) Paradise
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The adventures of a 12-year-old African boy sold into slavery by his father to pay off a debt. The setting is East Africa, a place of trade caravans, tribal warfare and the beginnings of European colonization.
5) Peponi
Author
Language
English
Description
Swahili translation of the Nobel-prize winning author's 1994 novel Paradise.
6) Theft
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize [in Literature], a master storyteller captures a time of dizzying global change. At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the...
7) Gravel heart
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
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...
8) By the sea
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"On a late November afternoon, Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport from his native Zanzibar. With him he has a small bag in which lies his most precious possession-a mahogany box containing incense. He used to own a furniture shop, have a house and be a husband and father. Now he is an asylum seeker from paradise, silence his only protection. Meanwhile, Latif Mahmud, a distinguished young professor, lives quietly alone in his London flat. When the...
Author
Language
English
Description
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 told anyone...
10) Desertion
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The consequences of an illicit love affair reverberate from the heyday of the British empire to the aftermath of African independence. Early one morning in 1899, an Englishman named Martin Pearce stumbles out of the desert and collapses at the feet of Hassanali's a local shopkeeper. As Hassanali's sister, Rehana, nurses Pearce back to health, a love affair sparks. Its reverberations will ripple decades into the future, when another clandestine affairs...
11) Admiring silence
Author
Language
English
Description
"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...
12) Pilgrims way
Author
Language
English
Description
An extraordinary depiction of the life of an immigrant, as he struggles to come to terms with the horror of his past and the meaning of his pilgrimage to England
13) La vida, después
Author
Language
Español
Description
La última novela del Premio Nobel de Literatura 2021, inédita en España.Una conmovedora historia de amor con la guerra y el colonialismo como telón de fondo. Cuando todavía era un niño, Ilyas les fue arrebatado a sus padres por las tropas coloniales alemanas; tras años de ausencia y de batalla contra su propio pueblo, regresa a la ciudad de su infancia, donde sus padres han desaparecido y su hermana Afiya ha sido dada en adopción. Otro joven...
14) Dottie
Author
Language
English
Description
"A searing tale of a young woman discovering her troubled family history and cultural past. Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour finds solace amidst the squalor of her childhood by spinning warm tales of affection about her beautiful names. But she knows nothing of their origins, and little of her family history - or the abuse her ancestors suffered as they made their home in Britain. At seventeen, she takes on the burden of responsibility for her brother...
15) El desertor
Author
Language
Español
Description
"Obra maestra del premio Nobel de Literatura en la que las consecuencias de una relación amorosa prohibida resuenan desde el Imperio británico hasta la independencia africana Una mañana de 1899, Martin Pearce, un escritor, viajero y orientalista ingles, exhausto despues de escapar de una banda de ladrones, llega a una pequeña ciudad costera de África Oriental. Allí, en esa población en ruinas al borde de la vida civilizada, se enamora de Rehana,...
16) Paraíso
Author
Language
Español
Description
Cuando los padres de Yusuf, de doce años, le dicen que vivirá con su tío Aziz durante una temporada, el chico se muestra entusiasmado. Pero lo que Yusuf no sabe es que su padre lo ha empeñado para saldar una deuda imposible de pagar, ni tampoco que Aziz no es pariente suyo, sino un rico y acaudalado comerciante con el que viajará por África central y las riberas del Congo en vísperas de la primera guerra mundial. A través de los ojos de ese...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Hassan Omar is a gifted young man, with a potentially bright future but a past marred by poverty. In the wake of a national uprising, and with a new government in place, though, he is denied a scholarship to a university abroad and deprived of the opportunity to study further. Instead, Hassan travels to Nairobi to stay with a wealthy uncle, in the hope that he will release his mother's rightful share of the family inheritance"--
18) A grain of wheat
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya's independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952-1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers' tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including...