Abdulrazak Gurnah

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022 A NEW YORKER “ESSENTIAL READ” A NATIONAL BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, TIME, THE NEW YORKER, BOOKPAGE, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS “Superb. . . . A celebration of a place and time when people held onto their own ways, and basked in ordinary joys even as outside forces conspired to take them away.” —New York Times 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, 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.

A Novel

Afterlives

Celine

The old merchants' business dealings depended on trust but that did not mean they trusted each other. 

None of the men had asked about his pain, although they could not have tailed to notice his limp. He was grateful for that because sympathy in such situations required disclosure in return. 

just so that he could hear her voice, which was throaty and rich in a way he found moving.

Afterlives quotes

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