By the Sea

Proof Copy. 8vo. 245pp. Pictorial card wrappers.

Signed by Author to title-page.

His sixth novel. Longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 2001. A compelling narrative of the trauma of displacement in post-colonial Africa, a theme Gurnah repeatedly mines in his books as a refugee himself from the 1960's regime of President Abeid Karume in Zanzibar.

Recently retired from his post as professor of English and post-colonial literatures at the University of Kent, where he focused principally on writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Salman Rushdie. The citation as recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature exults "his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents". Previously shortlisted for both the Booker and Whitbread Prizes for his 1994 novel Paradise.

"Rarely 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 enchantment." –The Times