ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022
A NEW YORKER "ESSENTIAL READ"****
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON
POST, TIME, THE NEW YORKER, BOOKPAGE, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS
"Superb. . . . A celebration of a place and time when people held onto
their own ways, and basked in ordinary joys even as outside forces
conspired to take them away.**" *--***New York Times
From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a sweeping,
multi-generational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the
brutal colonization of east Africa.
When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast
of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting
against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his
sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home
from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes
on his back**-**until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these
young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever
more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent
falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.
