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The Last Gift

By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature
Abbas has never told anyone about his past; about what happened before he was a sailor on the high seas, before he met his wife Maryam outside a Boots in Exeter, before they settled into a quiet life in Norwich with their children, Jamal and Hanna. Now, at the age of sixty-three, he suffers a collapse that renders him bedbound and unable to speak about things he thought he would one day have to.
Jamal and Hanna have grown up and gone out into the world. They were both born in England but cannot shake a sense of apartness. Hanna calls herself Anna now, and has just moved to a new city to be near her boyfriend. She feels the relationship is headed somewhere serious, but the words have not yet been spoken out loud. Jamal, the listener of the family, moves into a student house and is captivated by a young woman with dark-blue eyes and her own, complex story to tell. Abbas's illness forces both children home, to the dark silences of their father and the fretful capability of their mother Maryam, who began life as a foundling and has never thought to find herself, until now.
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'Gurnah is a master storyteller' FINANCIAL TIMES

'Gurnah writes with wonderful insight about family relationships and he folds in the layers of history with elegance and warmth' THE TIMES
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 28, 2013
      Gurnah’s latest (after Paradise) follows an East African immigrant living in a small English town as he and his family reckon with his past, which has long been shrouded in mystery. After suffering a debilitating stroke at age 63, Abbas suddenly wants to speak for the first time about the youthful decisions that drove him to leave his native Zanzibar, become a sailor, and eventually marry and settle down in England. As his wife, Maryam, and their children, Hanna and Jamal, care for the ailing Abbas, they too find themselves confronting their memories. Maryam, for her part, recalls her childhood as a foundling without parents or ancestry, which drove her to cling to Abbas and compromise her dreams. In the meantime, the rebellious Hanna and her English lover, Nick, encounter his family’s condescension and bigotry, while the contemplative grad student Jamal finds love and discovers his vocation as a writer. Over the course of this haunting novel, the dying Abbas prepares a last gift of memory for his wife and children. Though the pacing is slow at times, Gurnah manages to match a strong plot with powerful musings on mortality, the weight of memory, and the struggle to establish a postcolonial identity. Agent: Deborah Rogers, Rogers, Coleridge & White.

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