The Book Beat reading group has selected Afterlives by 2021 Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. We will discuss this at our next meeting on Wednesday, March 25 at 7pm. Books are now in stock and discounted 15%.
The reading group discusses books in translation with meetings held monthly at Book Beat on the last Wednesday of the month. Meetings are held both instore and online via Zoom. Our reading group is free and open to the public. If you’d like to attend online please send us your name and email address and we will add you to our list, a link to Zoom online will be sent on the day of the meeting.
From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a sweeping, multi-generational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the brutal colonization of east Africa.
When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back–until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.
‘Riveting and heartbreaking … A compelling novel, one that gathers close all those who were meant to be forgotten, and refuses their erasure’ Maaza Mengiste, Guardian
‘A brilliant and important book for our times, by a wondrous writer’ Philippe Sands, New Statesman, Books of the Year
‘One of the world’s most prominent postcolonial writers … He has consistently and with great compassion penetrated the effects of colonialism in East Africa and its effects on the lives of uprooted and migrating individuals’ –Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee
Abdulrazak Gurnah is the 2021 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the author of ten previous novels, including Afterlives (named a 2022 Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, and The New Yorker), Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and Desertion. Born and raised in Zanzibar, he is Professor Emeritus of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. He lives in Canterbury, England.