By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature 'There is a wonderful sardonic eloquence to
this unnamed narrator's voice' Financial Times 'I don't think I've ever read a novel that is so
convincingly and hauntingly sad about the loss of home' Independent on Sunday
_____________________ He thinks as he escapes from Zanzibar that he will probably never
return and yet the dream of studying in England matters above that. Things do not happen quite
as he imagined - the school where he teaches is cramped and violent he forgets how it feels to
belong. But there is Emma beautiful rebellious Emma who turns away from her white
middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child. And in return he spins stories of
his home and keeps her a secret from his family. Twenty years later when the barriers at last
come down in Zanzibar he is able and compelled to go back. What he discovers there in a story
potent with truth will change the entire vision of his life.
