Paradise

From the Nobel Prize winner, a coming-of-age story that illuminates the harshness and beauty of an Africa on the brink of colonization.

“[Gurnah’s novels] recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.” —Nobel Committee for Literature at the Swedish Academy

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “breakthrough” work. It is at once the chronicle of an African boy’s coming-of-age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of African tradition by European colonialism.

Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, twelve-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa. Through Yusuf’s eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. The result is what Publishers Weekly calls a “vibrant” and “powerful” work that “evokes the Edenic natural beauty of a continent on the verge of full-scale imperialist takeover.”

“An evocative portrait of Africa on the brink of change . . . A poignant meditation on the nature of freedom and the loss of innocence.” —The New York Times Book Review

“By turns touching and horrifying, it is a novel to be grateful for.” —Barry Unsworth, Booker Prize–winning author

“Many layered, violent, beautiful and strange . . . a poetic and vividly conjured book about Africa and the brooding power of the unknown.” —Independent on Sunday