Afterlives: A Novel
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022
A NEW YORKER “ESSENTIAL READ”
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, TIME, THE NEW YORKER, BOOKPAGE, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Superb. . . . A celebration of a place and time when people held onto their own ways, and basked in ordinary joys even as outside forces conspired to take them away.” —New York Times
From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a sweeping, multi-generational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the brutal colonization of east Africa.
When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back–until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.
A NEW YORKER “ESSENTIAL READ”
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, TIME, THE NEW YORKER, BOOKPAGE, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Superb. . . . A celebration of a place and time when people held onto their own ways, and basked in ordinary joys even as outside forces conspired to take them away.” —New York Times
From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a sweeping, multi-generational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the brutal colonization of east Africa.
When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back–until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.
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Community Reviews
Interesting as stories but not worth reading to the end. The first half or so you got tedious almost daily accounts of the characters and by the end they skipped months and years. Weird flow and
By the end I didn’t really get which person we were supposed to have focused on.
The Nobel Prize Winning Novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel, After Lives was published in 2020. Gurnah’s novel After Lives traces how the lives of people who live in a household together on the Swahili Coast in present-day Tanzania were affected by the military activities of World War I on the East African front. Gurnah writes that “later these events would be turned into stories of absurd and nonchalant heroics, but for those who lived through it, this was a time when their land was soaked in blood and littered with corpses” (Gurnah 137).” I read the large print edition of Gurnah’s After Lives. Gurah is interested in why so many Africans fought for the European Colonial Powers during World War I. Gurah was born in Zanzibar which is part of the Swahili Coast. After the Zanzibar Revolution, a revolution that led to the ethnic cleansing of Zanzibari that were of Arab descent, Gurah moved to the United Kingdom (Lucas 2022). Gurah is a professor emeritus of English and Post Colonial Studies at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. I think Gurah is able to capture the rhythm of life on the Swahili Coast between World War I and World War II. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel, After Lives, is an excellent view of the effects of World War I on a personal level in the region of the Swahili Coast of East Africa.
Works Cited:
Glassman, Jonathan. 2011. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press.
Lucas, Julian “A Nobel Laureate Revisits the Great War’s African Front.”
The New Yorker. October 17, 2022. A Nobel Laureate Revisits the Great War’s African Front | The New Yorker
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