When Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel prize in literature for 2021, he was already three decades into a writing career that has spanned novels, short stories, and non-fiction.
The UK-based Tanzanian has enjoyed critical success but is far from a household name. That, of course, could be about to change.
Keep reading for a rundown of some of his best novels to date, plus some great books by past Nobel Laureates well worth adding to your to-read pile.
1. Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Paradise, released in 1994, is Gurnah’s fourth novel and was shortlisted for both the Booker prize and the Whitbread prize for fiction.
It follows Yusuf, a boy born in Tanzania early in the 20th century. When he is handed over to a man whom he believes to be his uncle, in payment for his father’s unpaid debt, Yusuf becomes the man’s servant.
Finding beauty in the small world he inhabits, Yusuf begins to tend his master’s garden. Coddled beneath its four high walls Yusuf imagines the world outside until, aged 17, he sets out with his master on an ill-advised trading mission into the Congo basin.
The traders will confront disease, wild animals, and unwelcoming tribespeople, leaving Yusuf to question whether paradise exists in the wider world or in the garden he has left behind.
Blending myth, folklore, and Biblical and Koranic tradition, the Independent called Paradise “many-layered, violent, beautiful and strange.”
2. By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Exile is a theme Gurnah returns to often. In By the Sea, the central character Saleh Omar is living in an unnamed English seaside town having left Zanzibar, a small island off the coast of Tanzania in the Indian Ocean.
An asylum-seeker, his arrival at Gatwick airport a year previously is still clear in his mind and yet the story he has to tell weaves and criss-crosses the globe.
Multiple narrators with conflicting accounts soon belie the deceptive simplicity of an exile’s life by the sea, in an exquisite tale of memory and reinvention.
3. An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel prize in 2017. Born in Nagasaki, Ishiguro moved to England when he was just five.
He found initial fame with his tale of the reserved country house butler Stevens (portrayed on film by Anthony Hopkins) in Remains of the Day. The themes of that book were also central to his earlier, Japan-set works, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World.
Masuji Ono, a once-celebrated artist tends his garden and makes house repairs while looking back on his life and career.
It is 1948 and Japan is rebuilding after the second world war. As Ono senses his increasing ostracism, he is forced to re-examine his politics and the impact of Japan’s rising militarism on his past work.
With Japan’s youth looking to move beyond the country’s imperial past, Ono’s story becomes one of hesitation and guilt, ageing and solitude. The Guardian called the novel “a tour de force of unreliable narration.”
4. Boyhood / Youth / Summertime by J.M. Coetzee
J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa though now lives in Australia. He became a Nobel Laureate in 2003, based on books that: “in innumerable guises portray the surprising involvement of the outsider.”
Disgrace, his story about a fallen English professor in post-apartheid South Africa won the 1999 Booker prize and he is the author of 13 other novels. But it is in his loose trilogy of autobiographical works that he casts himself as the “outsider”.
In Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, a young boy, grows up in the town of Worcester in the Western Cape. Coetzee uses the distance of a third-person narration to examine his younger self with removed coldness. He evokes the confusion and highs and lows of childhood in a way that is – according to the Irish Times – “as funny, cruel and terrifying as life itself.”
Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II, adopts the same third-person narrative and finds a 20-year-old Coetzee in 1960s London. Having fled political unrest in his native South Africa, he is disillusioned with life. Taking a job at IBM he is unable to understand why the people he meets fail to see through his quiet exterior and to the flame within. Women, especially, seem unable to evoke the passion he believes he needs to truly develop as an artist.
Finally, in Summertime, Coetzee employs a stylistic shift. The story here is told from the perspective of Mr Vincent, an English academic who is writing a biography of J.M. Coetzee. The narrative takes the form of a series of interviews with former acquaintances of Coetzee, including a woman with whom he had an affair in the 1970s.
Self-deprecating in the extreme, the book asks why anyone should care about the author or bother to read a book about or indeed written by him.
5. Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
In Gurnah’s latest, 2020’s Afterlives, fate brings together three young lives.
Ilyas returns to the village of his birth many years after being stolen by German colonial troops. His parents are gone, and his sister Afiya has been given away. Hamza, too, has returned from a war he was sold into and is looking for the love of Afiya. Meanwhile, on another continent, the threat of a new war looms.
A writer at the top of his game, the Guardian calls it “riveting and heart-breaking […] A compelling novel, one that gathers close all those who were meant to be forgotten and refuses their erasure.”
