**By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021** A "corrosively funny and relentless"
( The New York Times ) tale of cultural identity and displacement Admiring Silence is the
story of a man's dual lives as a refugee from his native Zanzibar in England. The unnamed
narrator of this dazzling novel escapes from Zanzibar to England knowing that he will probably
never return. In his new country things are not quite as he imagined - the school where he
teaches is cramped and violent and he quickly forgets how it feels to belong. But when he
meets a beautiful rebellious woman named Emma and when Emma turns away from her white
middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child the narrator chooses to hide his
past from his new family and his present circumstance from his family back in Zanzibar.
Twenty years later when the barriers at last come down in Zanzibar he is compelled to go
back. What he discovers there in a story potent with truth will change the entire vision of
his life.
