Gracing the cover of this week's New York Times Book Review, this moving novel from last year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature arrives to nearly universal critical acclaim. Author Abdulrazak Gurnah has written a sweeping and dramatic chronicle of life in East Africa under German colonialization during the early 20th century, which should be of interest to readers who enjoyed Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace or Patrice Nganang's A Trail of Crab Tracks.Publisher's description:
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.