Mapped
By the Sea
Abdulrazak Gurnah
An elderly man, Saleh Omar, arrives in England seeking asylum, carrying the silence of a lifetime and a feud that reaches back to Zanzibar, over a house, a debt and the son of the man he ruined. Gurnah roots the past in the real Stone Town of Zanzibar: the merchant's shop and the contested house, the harbour and its dhow trade on the Indian Ocean, and the revolution that swept it all away; the English seaside town where the two exiles finally meet lies far outside that lost world.
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Paradise
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Gurnah's East Africa on the eve of the First World War: a boy pawned to settle his father's debt grows up in a merchant's household on the Swahili coast, then travels inland with a trading caravan across the dry plateau to the great lakes and the mountains, moving through Arab, African and Indian worlds as German colonial power tightens. The map runs from the coral-stone coast at Kilwa and Bagamoyo up the old caravan road to Tabora, on to Lake Tanganyika, and north to the snow of Kilimanjaro.
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