Award-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah discusses Afterlives in our third event with Africa Writes–Exeter Book Club.

Taking up where his 1994 Booker-shortlisted novel Paradise leftoff, Abdulrazak Gurnah transports his readers back to the First World War inhis latest novel Afterlives.This coming-of-age novel follows the unanchored adolescent lives of Ilyas,Hamza and Afiya disrupted by the war in the early twentieth century, and interrogates the personal and political cost of rebellion.

Ilyasis stolen by the askari, a Swahili and Arabic name for the German colonial troops, Schutzruppe. Years later he returns home orphaned and his sister, Afiya, given away. Hamza is not stolen, but was sold and comes of age in the army. Ilyas' and Hamza’s experience in the askari during the war form the nexus of Afterlives. Meanwhile a quiet and resilient romance buds between Hamza and Afiya.

You can read an excerpt from the book at https://africawrites.org/blog/read-excerpt-from-afterlives-by-abdulrazak-gurnah/, courtesyof Bloomsbury.

Abdulrazak Gurnah - praised by Giles Foden as ‘one of Africa’s greatest living writers’- will be in conversation with writer Novuyo Rosa Tshuma.

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Africa Writes - Exeter Book Club: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives