By the Sea

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.

Saleh Omar

Stone Town (Saleh's shop)

The past

In the coral-stone lanes of Stone Town, Saleh built a prosperous life as a merchant before it was taken from him, and it is to this lost world that his long English silence keeps returning. Gurnah conjures the layered, cosmopolitan Zanzibar of Arabs, Indians, Persians and Africans, a whole civilisation the book mourns.

The Zanzibar past

explicit Saleh Omar was a furniture and trade merchant in Stone Town, the real old quarter of Zanzibar; his shop is sited in that historic Indian Ocean port town.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗