By The Sea

Description

‘One scarcely dares breathe while reading it for fear of breaking the enchantment’ The Times

‘Gurnah is a master storyteller’ Financial Times

On a late November afternoon Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport from Zanzibar, a far away island in the Indian Ocean. With him he has a small bag in which lies his most precious possession – a mahogany box containing incense. He used to own a furniture shop, have a house and be a husband and father. Now he is an asylum seeker from paradise; silence his only protection.

Meanwhile Latif Mahmud, someone intimately connected with Saleh’s past, lives quietly alone in his London flat. When Saleh and Latif meet in an English seaside town, a story is unravelled. It is a story of love and betrayal, seduction and possession, and of a people desperately trying to find stability amidst the maelstrom of their times.

Author Biography

Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of ten novels. Born and raised in Zanzibar, he is Professor Emeritus of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. He lives in Canterbury, England.