Paradise: By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021 (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
This novel follows 12 year old Yusuf as he is taken from his home as collateral for his parents' debt to a wealthy merchant. As he grows, Yusuf journeys the African interior, dodges people attracted to his youth & beauty, and learns about faith, freedom, and love.
Taking place in pre-colonial eastern Africa, this historical novel provides breathtaking descriptions of the interior, gripping suspense & danger, and a thought-provoking discussion on human nature through a Koranic and non-European frame. This will be a book I come back to again and again.
-Brittni
— From BrittniFrom 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 AcademyShortlisted 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."