TANZANIA AUTHOR · FICTION · GENERAL
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Also known as: عبد الرزاق سالم قرنح
Abdulrazak Gurnah FRSL (born 20 December 1948) is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; Desertion (2005); and By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents". He is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. [source](
Time's up, she thought.
— from Paradise
Most acclaimed
Paradise
"Rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year's Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what went on at the Oven these days was not to be believed . . . The proof they had been collecting since the terrible discovery in the spring could not be denied: the one thing that connected all these catastrophes was in the Convent. And in the Convent were those women."In Paradise--her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature--Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain," assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There . . . where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose." Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.From the Hardcover edition.
Pilgrims way
Published as "Pilgrim's Way" in the US, but originally titled "Memory Hold the Door" when first published in the UK, is a memoir written by John Buchan, 1875-1940, who died prior to publication. Buchan lived an extremely varied and accomplished life, born in Scotland and starting out as the son of a Presbyterian minister. Educated in local schools in the Scottish borders, he first enrolled at the University of Glasgow and then came down to Oxford University. Too poor to eat in hall, he was able, during his two years at Oxford, to earn substantial income through his published writings. Buchan was trained as a barrister but went to South Africa as a part of the post-Boer War British effort to establish a new government. He subsequently became a partner in a publishing house, produced more than fifty novels, biographies and histories, served in World War One as Director of Information and produced a very fine history of the War. He served in Parliament as representative of the Scottish Universities, became the Crown's representative to the Church of Scotland, and, in 1935, was appointed Governor-General of Canada. He was ennobled as Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield. John Buchan's fame rests primarily on his novels of adventure, the most famous being "The Thirty-Nine Steps". This memoir is filled with the man's love of life and humanity. It is a delightful read and a fascinating history of the period of turmoil in Britain during the first four decades of the 20th century.
The last gift
"Abbas has never told anyone about his past--before he was a sailor on the high seas, before he met his wife Maryam outside a Boots in Exeter, before they settled into a quiet life in Norwich with their children, Jamal and Hanna. Now, at the age of sixty-three, he suffers a collapse that renders him bedbound and unable to speak about things he thought he would one day have to."--