Paradise
Abdulrazak Gurnah
A boy pawned to settle his father's debt, in East Africa before colonial rule tightens.
Gurnah follows Yusuf, a boy handed to a merchant to repay his father's debt, across an East African world of trade caravans, Swahili towns and encroaching German colonialism before the First World War. Quiet and layered, it reworks a coming-of-age story into a meditation on servitude and belonging. The Swedish Academy cited such work when it awarded Gurnah the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Its legacy. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and remains his best-known novel.
- Author
- Abdulrazak Gurnah
- First published
- 1994
- Genre
- Novel
- Theme
- Contemporary Voices, Memoir and Testimony
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