BY THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2021 LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE 2021 "Riveting and heartbreaking ... A compelling novel, one that gathers close all those who were meant to be forgotten, and refuses their erasure." --Maaza Mengiste, Guardian "A brilliant and important book for our times, by a wondrous writer." --Philippe Sands, New Statesman, Books of the Year While he was still a little boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the German colonial troops. After years away, fighting in a war against his own people, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away. Another young man returns at the same time. Hamza was not stolen for the war, but sold into it; he has grown up at the right hand of an officer whose protection has marked him life. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he seeks only work and security – and the love of the beautiful Afiya. As fate knots these young people together, as they live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war on another continent lengthens and darkens, ready to snatch them up and carry them away… Reviews: “An aural archive of a lost Africa ... alive with the unexpected. In it, an obliterated world is enthrallingly retrieved” —Sunday Times “From the first assured pages of Afterlives, a book of quiet beauty and tragedy, it is clear one is in the hands of a master storyteller” —Financial Times “A tender account of the extraordinariness of ordinary lives, Afterlives combines entrancing storytelling with writing whose exquisite emotional precision confirms Gurnah's place among the outstanding stylists of modern English prose. Like its predecessors, this is a novel that demands to be read and reread, for its humour, generosity of spirit and clear-sighted vision of the infinite contradictions of human nature” —Evening Standard “Riveting and heartbreaking ... A compelling novel, one that gathers close all those who were meant to be forgotten, and refuses their erasure.” —Guardian “In clean, measured prose, Gurnah zooms in on individual acts of violence ... and unexpected acts of kindness. Affecting in its ordinariness, Afterlives is a compelling exploration of the urge to find places of sanctuary” —Daily Telegraph “Gurnah is a master storyteller” —Financial Times “As beautifully written and pleasurable as anything I've read ... The work of a maestro” —Guardian “Rarely in a lifetime can you open a book and find that reading it encapsulates the enchanting qualities of a love affair ... one scarcely dares breathe while reading it for fear of breaking the enchantment” —The Times “Many layered, violent, beautiful and strange ... a poetic and vividly conjured book about Africa and the brooding power of the unknown” —Independent on Sunday “A powerfully evocative oeuvre that keeps coming back to the same questions, in spare, graceful prose, about the ties that bind and the ties that fray” —Daily Telegraph “A vibrant and vivid novel which shows human beings in all their generosity and greed, pettiness and nobility, so that even minor characters seem capable of carrying entire novels all by themselves” —Herald “Abdulrazak Gurnah is a master of his craft ... An intricate, delicate novel, vitally necessary” —New Internationalist About the Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. He is the author of ten novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) The Last Gift, Gravel Heart, and Afterlives, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. He was Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury. |