Paradise: By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021

From the Nobel Prize winner, a coming-of-age story that illuminates the harshness and beauty of an Africa on the brink of colonization "[Gurnahs novels] recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world." Nobel Committee for Literature at the Swedish Academy Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnahs breakthrough work. It is at once the chronicle of an African boys coming-of-age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of African tradition by European colonialism. Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, twelve-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa. Through Yusufs eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. The result is what Publishers Weekly calls a vibrant and powerful work that evokes the Edenic natural beauty of a continent on the verge of full-scale imperialist takeover.