Last Gift - Hardcover

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747599947 ISBN 13: 9780747599944

Publisher: Bloomsbury UK, 2011

Synopsis

One day, long before the troubles, he slipped away without saying a word to anyone and never went back. And then another day, forty three years later, he collapsed just inside the front door of his house in a small English town. It was late in the day when it happened, on his way home after work, but it was also late in the day altogether. He had left things for too long and there was no one to blame for it but himself. 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. Jamal and Hanna have grown up and gone out into the world. They were both born in England but cannot shake a sense of apartness. Hanna calls herself Anna now, and has just moved to a new city to b

About this title

About the Author:

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 in Zanzibar and teaches at the University of Kent. He is the author of seven novels which include Paradise (shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prizes), By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the RFI Temoin du monde prize) and Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize).

Review:

PRAISE FOR ABDULRAZAK GURNAH:`Abdulrazak Gurnah is a captivating storyteller, with a voice both lyrical and mordant, and an oeuvre haunted by memory and loss' * Guardian * `Gurnah has some of the sharpness and clarity of VS Naipaul and more than a dash of Ben Okri's measured poetic diction' * New Statesman * `As always with Gurnah's writing, you relish his juxtapositions of beauty and bitterness, political edge and personal pain, betrayal and resilience' * Michele Roberts * `Gurnah writes beautifully, with the satisfying assurance of someone who knows how to achieve his effects without undue fuss but with absolute precision' * Daily Telegraph *

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0747599947
• ISBN 13: 9780747599944
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288