Afterlives

From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a sweeping, multi-generational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the brutal colonization of east Africa

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 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, work, and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.

Story Locale:Swahili coast of present-day Tanzania

About the Author

Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of ten novels, including Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award), and Desertion. Born and raised in Zanzibar, he is Professor Emeritus of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England.

Author Residence: Canterbury, England