Afterlives, by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Welcome back to our book club!
This month, we’ll read «Afterlives», by Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won the Nobel prize in 2021.
This event is free. All you need to do is read the book and share your thoughts! :)

The Book

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, is back from the war. He was not stolen but sold into service, where he became the protégé of an officer whose special interest has left him literally scarred for life. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he seeks only steady work and safety – 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, ready to snatch them up and once again carry them away.

Spanning from the end of the nineteenth century, when the Europeans carved up Africa, on through the tumultuous decades of revolt and suppression that followed, «Afterlives» is an astonishingly moving portrait of survivors refusing to sacrifice their humanity to the violent forces that assail them.

The Author

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a celebrated novelist and academic known for his powerful explorations of exile, identity, and the legacy of colonialism.
Born on December 20, 1948, in Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania), Gurnah left his homeland as a teenager during a period of political upheaval and sought refuge in the United Kingdom. His experiences as a refugee deeply shaped his writing, which often centers on displacement, migration, and the emotional complexities of belonging.

In addition to his literary career, Gurnah served as a professor of English and postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent. In 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
Today, Abdulrazak Gurnah is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary voices in global literature, offering profound insights into the enduring effects of history on individual lives.