Description
Book SynopsisBy the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature ‘Demands to be read and reread, for its humour, generosity of spirit and clear-sighted vision’ Evening Standard ‘Gurnah zooms in on individual acts of violence ... and unexpected acts of kindness’ Daily Telegraph ________________________ Demoralised by small persecutions and the squalor and poverty of his life, Daud takes refuge in his imagination. He composes wry, sardonic letters hectoring friends and enemies, and invents a lurid colonial past for every old man he encounters. His greatest solace is cricket and the symbolic defeat of the empire at the hands of the mighty West Indies. Although subject to attacks of bitterness and remorse, his captivating sense of humour never deserts him as he struggles to come to terms with the horror of his past and the meaning of his pilgrimage to England.
Trade ReviewExile has given Gurnah a perspective on the “balance between things” that is
astonishing, superb * Observer *
[A]
captivating storyteller, with a voice both
lyrical and mordant, and an oeuvre
haunted by memory and loss. His
intricate novels of arrival and departure … reveal, with flashes of acerbic humour, the lingering ties that bind continents, and how competing versions of history collide * Guardian *
Gurnah is a master storyteller -- Aminatta Forna * Financial Times *
Gurnah etches with
biting incisiveness the experiences of immigrants exposed to contempt, hostility or patronising indifference on their arrival in Britain * Spectator *
Gurnah writes with
wonderful insight about family relationships and he folds in the layers of history with
elegance and warmth * The Times *
