No New Land - Softcover

M.G. Vassanji

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140174044 ISBN 13: 9780140174045

Publisher: Penguin, 1992

Synopsis

Nurdin Lalani and his family, Asian immigrants from Africa, have come to the Toronto suburb of Don Mills only to find that the old world and its values pursue them. A genial orderly at a downtown hospital, he has been accused of sexually assaulting a girl. Although he is innocent, traditional propriety prompts him to question the purity of his own thoughts. Ultimately, his friendship with the enlightened Sushila offers him an alluring freedom from a past that haunts him, a marriage that has become routine, and from the trials of coping with teenage children. Introducing us to a cast of vividly drawn characters within this immigrant community, Vassanji is a keen observer of lives caught between one world and another.

About this title

From the Back Cover

“A novel of considerable charm and intelligence, informed by a delightful sense of irony.”
–Mordecai Richler

“Vassanji probes beneath the surface to create a compelling and poignant portrait of human displacement.”
–Ottawa Citizen

“It is part of Vassanji’s great talent to demonstrate that the minor changes – unexpected love, sex, accusations – in the life of a very modest man are, in fact, transformations of history.”
–Globe and Mail

“Vassanji, in charting a tiny part of the Canadian reality, offers up certain truths, thought-provoking, disturbing, but ultimately, and in a small way, hopeful.”
–Saturday Night

“No New Land, like Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints and Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café, redefines and extends our sense of the possibilities, not of multicultural literature in Canada, but of Canadian writing tout court.”
–Books in Canada

“A poignant story of the immigrant experience....Vassanji has provided an absorbing snapshot of our often vulnerable neighbors.”
–Montreal Gazette

“[Vassanji] writes in an inviting, straightforward style laced with humour....”
–Vancouver Sun

“No New Land creates a rich portrait of a transplanted community.”
–Calgary Herald

“No New Land, with quiet humor and wisdom, gives deep insight into the strains and promises of immigration.”
–World Literature Today

About the Author

M. G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. Before coming to Canada in 1978, he attended M.I.T., and later was writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa in their prestigious International Writing Program. Vassanji’s fiction to date comprises five novels and a book of short stories: The Gunny Sack (1989), which won a Regional Commonwealth Writers Prize; No New Land (1991); Uhuru Street (short stories, 1992); The Book of Secrets (1994), a national bestseller and the winner of the inaugural Giller Prize; Amriika (1999); and, most recently, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), which won The Giller Prize.

Vassanji was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize in 1994, in recognition of his achievement in and contribution to the world of letters, and was in that same year chosen as one of twelve Canadians on Maclean’s Honour Roll.

M. G. Vassanji lives in Toronto.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0140174044
• ISBN 13: 9780140174045
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208