At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university in Dar es Salaam with a new swagger and sense of ambition. There he catches the eye of Fauzia, who sees in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. When the two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all, they little imagine how deeply their fates will entwine and diverge. As rapidly accelerating global change reaches even their quiet corner of the world, bringing tourists, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.

From the Nobel Prize winner, a coming-of-age story that illuminates the harshness and beauty of an Africa on the brink of colonization

[Gurnah's novels] recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world. --Nobel Committee for Literature at the Swedish Academy

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnah's breakthrough work. It is at once the chronicle of an African boy's coming-of-age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of African tradition by European colonialism.

Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, twelve-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa. Through Yusuf's eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. The result is what Publishers Weekly calls a vibrant and powerful work that evokes the Edenic natural beauty of a continent on the verge of full-scale imperialist takeover.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnah's breakthrough work. It is at once the chronicle of an African boy's coming-of-age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of African tradition by European colonialism.

Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, twelve-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa. Through Yusuf's eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. The result is what Publishers Weekly calls a vibrant and powerful work that evokes the Edenic natural beauty of a continent on the verge of full-scale imperialist takeover.

Early one morning in 1899, an Englishman named Martin Pearce stumbles out of the desert into an East African coastal town and collapses at the feet of Hassanali, a local shopkeeper. When Hassanali's sister, the beautiful and disillusioned Rehana, nurses Pearce back to health, a love affair sparks, with consequences that will ripple decades into the future, when another clandestine affair bursts into flame, with equally unforeseen and dramatic consequences. In this devastating and ingeniously spun tale, the Nobelist Abdulrazak Gurnah brilliantly dramatizes the personal and political legacies of colonialism.

From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a powerful story of exile, migration, and betrayal.

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 disheveled introspection, Salim is confused and ashamed. His mother does not discuss the change, nor does she explain her absences with a strange man; silence is layered on silence.

When glamorous Uncle Amir, now a senior diplomat, offers Salim an escape, the lonely teenager travels to London for college. But nothing has prepared him for the biting cold and seething crowds of this hostile city. Struggling to find a foothold, and to understand the darkness at the heart of his family, he must face devastating truths about those closest to him--and about love, sex, and power. Evoking the immigrant experience with unsentimental precision and profound understanding, Gravel Heart is a powerfully affecting story of isolation, identity, belonging, and betrayal, and Abdulrazak Gurnah's most astonishing achievement.

From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, an astounding meditation on family, self and the meaning of home.

Abbas has never told anyone about his past-before he was a sailor on the high seas, before he met his wife Maryam outside a drugstore in Exeter, before they settled into a quiet life with their children, Jamal and Hanna. Now, at the age of sixty-three, he suffers a collapse that renders him unable to speak about things he thought he would one day have to.

Jamal and Hanna have grown up and gone out into the world. They were both born in England but cannot shake a sense of apartness. Hanna calls herself Anna now, and has just moved to a new city to be near her boyfriend. She feels the relationship is headed somewhere serious, but the words have not yet been spoken out loud. Jamal, the listener of the family, moves into a student house and is captivated by a young woman with dark blue eyes and her own complex story to tell. Abbas's illness forces both children home, to the dark silences of their father and the fretful capability of their mother, Maryam, who has never thought to find herself-until now.

Una novela sobre las consecuencias del pasado, el poder combativo del amor y la fuerza salvadora de la literatura.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A masterwork by the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, in which 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 into an East African coastal town and collapses at the feet of Hassanali, a local shopkeeper. When Hassanali's sister, the beautiful and disillusioned Rehana, nurses Pearce back to health, a love affair sparks, with consequences that will ripple decades into the future, when another clandestine affair bursts into flame, with equally unforeseen and dramatic consequences. In this devastating and ingeniously spun tale, the Nobelist Abdulrazak Gurnah brilliantly dramatizes the personal and political legacies of colonialism.

**By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021**

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 escapes from Zanzibar to England knowing that he will probably never return. In his new country, things are not quite as he imagined - the school where he teaches is cramped and violent, and he quickly forgets how it feels to belong.

But when he meets a beautiful, rebellious woman named Emma, and when Emma, turns away from her white, middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child, the narrator chooses to hide his past from his new family and his present circumstance from his family back in Zanzibar.

Twenty years later, when the barriers at last come down in Zanzibar, he is compelled to go back. What he discovers there, in a story potent with truth, will change the entire vision of his life.

By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

A searing tale of a young woman re-discovering her troubled family history and finding herself in the process.

In post-World War II England, 17-year-old Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour knows nothing of her family origins, and little of their history - or the abuse her ancestors suffered as they made their home in Britain. But Dottie knows what her family means to her, and in the wake of her mother's death, she's determined to keep the family together. She takes responsibility for her younger siblings, Sophie and Hudson.

But as Sophie drifts from man to man, and the confused Hudson is absorbed into a world of crime, Dottie is forced to consider her own needs. Feeling rootless in England, she seeks a space for herself and an identity through books and begins to clear a path through life. Gradually, Dottie gathers the confidence to take risks, to forge friendships and to challenge the labels that have been forced upon her.

For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith, Dottie is a deeply compassionate portrait of a second generation immigrant, a masterful examination of poverty and racism, and a psychologically nuanced story of family and survival.

**By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021**

A wonderful (Maaza Mengiste) 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 life in England.

Dear Catherine, he began. Here I sit, making a meal out of asking you to dinner. I don't really know how to do it. To have cultural integrity, I would have to send my aunt to speak, discreetly, to your aunt, who would then speak to your mother, who would speak to my mother, who would speak to my father, who would speak to me and then approach your mother, who would then approach you.

Daud has immigrated to England in the wake of political turmoil in his native Tanzania. For years, he has tried to hide his past. But when he meets Catherine, he is determined to recount for her the stories of his tragic upbringing, his flight to England, and the racism in his new homeland.

Structured as a pilgrimage, one which leads Daud deep into the pain and beauty of the past and forward into a new understanding of his life in exile, Pilgrims Way is a captivating, lyrical story about identity, memory, and immigration.

**By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021**

Vehement, comic and shrewd, Abdulrazak Gurnah's first novel is a compelling (New York Times) and unwavering contemplation of East African coastal life.

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.

In Nairobi, Hassan experiences the collision of past secrets and future hopes, and the compounding of fear and frustration, beauty and brutality. In his debut novel, Nobel Prize winning author Abdurlazak Gurnah creates a fierce tale of undeniable power.

La más reciente novela del Premio Nobel de Literatura 2021.

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 regresa al mismo tiempo: a Hamza no lo robaron para que combatiera, sino que lo vendieron. Con tan solo sus ropas a la espalda, se limita a buscar trabajo y seguridad... y el amor de la hermosa Afiya.

Apenas acaba de comenzar el siglo XX y alemanes, británicos, franceses y demás países se han repartido el continente africano. A medida que estos jóvenes supervivientes intentan rehacer sus vidas, la sombra de una nueva guerra, en otro continente, amenaza con llevárselos de nuevo.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Among the 100 Notable Books of 2022 according to The New York Times.

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022

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.

A moving love story set against the backdrop of war and colonialism.

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, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back--until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.

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 chiquillo descubriremos una naturaleza exuberante y hostil, poblada de tribus despiadadas e invasores desalmados, en la que una vida humana vale tanto como unas cuantas gotas de agua.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

[Gurnah's novels] recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world. --Nobel Committee for Literature at the Swedish Academy

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnah's breakthrough work. It is at once the chronicle of an African boy's coming-of-age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of African tradition by European colonialism.

Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, twelve-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa. Through Yusuf's eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. The result is what Publishers Weekly calls a vibrant and powerful work that evokes the Edenic natural beauty of a continent on the verge of full-scale imperialist takeover.

Huyendo de la mítica isla de Zanzíbar, tierra de mercaderes de perfumes y especias acunada por los monzones, Saleh Omar, un comerciante de 65 años, llega al aeropuerto de Gatwick con una caja de caoba llena de incienso y un pasaporte falso. Para comunicarse con él, los servicios sociales recurren a Latif Mahmud, un poeta experto en suajili, profesor y exiliado voluntario que vive apaciblemente en un apartamento de Londres. Cuando los dos hombres se encuentran en una pequeña ciudad junto al mar, una larga historia de amores y traiciones, seducciones y decepción, azarosos desplazamientos y litigios iniciada mucho tiempo atrás empieza a desenmarañarse.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

On a late November afternoon Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport from Zanzibar, a far away island in the Indian Ocean. With him he has a small bag in which there 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, but now he is an asylum seeker from paradise; silence his only protection.

Meanwhile, Latif Mahmud, someone intimately connected with Saleh's past, lives quietly alone in his London flat. When Saleh and Latif meet in an English seaside town, a story is unravelled. It is a story of love, betrayal, of seduction and of possession, and of a people desperately trying to find stability amidst the maelstrom of their times.

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 two encounter each other in an English seaside town, the narratives each carries of their mutual past begin to unravel--revealing an infinitely more fascinating story of love and betrayal, seduction and possession, and of a people desperately trying to find stability amidst the maelstrom of their times.