Afterlives

Written with all the adventure and thrill of Esi Edugyan's Washington Black and all the romantic sweep of Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, Afterlives is set to become a classic of African literature in the tradition of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun Abdulrazak Gurnah's four decade career has established him as one of the most distinguished voices in contemporary literature. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize with Paradise and longlisted with By the Sea, he also served as a one of the judges of the 2016 Man Booker PrizeThe story of the African soldiers recruited and often stolen to fight for European colonisers, the profoundly humane and compelling Afterlives is an unmissable addition to contemporary African literatureAbdulrazak Gurnah is the author of nine novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) The Last Gift and Gravel Heart. He was Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury.'One of Africa's greatest living writers' Giles Foden Restless, ambitious Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the Schutzruppe askari, the German colonial troops; after years away, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away. Hamza was not stolen, but was sold; he has come of age in the schutztruppe, at the right hand of an officer whose control has ensured his protection but marked him for life. The century is young. The Germans and the British and the French and the Belgians and whoever else have drawn their maps and signed their treaties and divided up Africa. As they seek complete dominion they are forced to extinguish revolt after revolt by the colonised. The conflict in Europe opens another arena in east Africa where a brutal war devastates the landscape. Hamza does not have words for how the war ended for him. Returning to the town of his childhood, all he wants is work, however humble, and security - and the beautiful Afiya. As these interlinked friends and survivors come and go, live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war lengthens and darkens, ready to snatch them up and carry them away.From 'one of Africa's greatest living writers' (Giles Foden), a shatteringly powerful novel about a forgotten piece of Africa colonial historyGurnah is a master storytellerAs beautifully written and pleasurable as anything I've read ... The work of a maestroAn aural archive of a lost Africa ... alive with the unexpected. In it, an obliterated world is enthrallingly retrievedRarely in a lifetime can you open a book and find that reading it encapsulates the enchanting qualities of a love affair ... one scarcely dares breathe while reading it for fear of breaking the enchantmentMany layered, violent, beautiful and strange ... a poetic and vividly conjured book about Africa and the brooding power of the unknownA powerfully evocative oeuvre that keeps coming back to the same questions, in spare, graceful prose, about the ties that bind and the ties that fray