PAWA'S BOOK OF THE WEEK ( WEEK 36): AFTERLIVES BY ABDULRAZAK GURNAH
AFTERLIVES, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s latest novel is set in East
Africa, from the late 19th to mid-20th century, when ”The Germans and the
British and the French and the Belgians and the Portuguese and the Italians and
whoever else had already had their congress and drawn their maps and signed
their treaties”, and resistance to colonial rule was put down with exemplary
savagery.
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.
Gurnah, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Zanzibar
and is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of Kent.
AFTERLIVES is available on Amazon.com
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