Description
Book SynopsisBy the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature 'There is a wonderful sardonic eloquence to this unnamed narrator's voice' Financial Times 'I don't think I've ever read a novel that is so convincingly and hauntingly sad about the loss of home' Independent on Sunday _____________________ He 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 is cramped and violent, he forgets how it feels to belong. But there is Emma, beautiful, rebellious Emma, who turns away from her white, middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child. And in return he spins stories of his home and keeps her a secret from his family. Twenty years later, when the barriers at last come down in Zanzibar, he is able and compelled to go back. What he discovers there, in a story potent with truth, will change the entire vision of his life.
Trade ReviewI don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that is
so convincingly and hauntingly sad about the loss of home, the impossible
longing to belong -- Michèle Roberts * Independent on Sunday *
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fifth novel,
Admiring Silence, is
his best to date … There is a
wonderful sardonic eloquence to this unnamed narrator’s voice, and the
playful humour and lack of self-pity which characterises his narrative is
totally convincing * Financial Times *
Through a
twisting, many-layered narrative,
Admiring Silence explores themes of race and betrayal with bitterly
satirical insight * Sunday Times *
