From 'one of Africa's greatest living writers' (Giles Foden), a shatteringly powerful novel about a forgotten piece of Africa colonial history
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.
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*
A remarkable novel, by a wondrous writer, deeply compelling, a
thread that links our humanity with the colonial legacy that lies
beneath, in ways that cut deep
*Philippe Sands*
To read Afterlives is to be returned to the joy of storytelling as
Abdulrazak Gurnah takes us to the place where imagined lives
collide with history. In prose as clear and as rhythmic as the
waters of the Indian Ocean, the story of Hamza and Afiya is one of
simple lives buffeted by colonial ambitions, of the courage it
takes to endure, to hold oneself with dignity, and to live with
hope in the heart
*Aminatta Forna*
Effortlessly compelling storytelling ... Gurnah excels at depicting
the lives of those made small by cruelty and injustice ... A
beautiful, cruel world of bittersweet encounters and pockets of
compassion, twists of fate and fluctuating fortunes ... You forget
that you are reading fiction, it feels so real
*Leila Aboulela*
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*
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