2001By 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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