From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a powerful
story of exile, migration, and betrayal.
Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with
his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is
a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and
Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island's white sands
obscuring the memory of recent conflict--the longed-for independence
from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his
father moves out, retreating into disheveled introspection, Salim is
confused and ashamed. His mother does not discuss the change, nor does
she explain her absences with a strange man; silence is layered on
silence.
When glamorous Uncle Amir, now a senior diplomat, offers Salim an
escape, the lonely teenager travels to London for college. But nothing
has prepared him for the biting cold and seething crowds of this hostile
city. Struggling to find a foothold, and to understand the darkness at
the heart of his family, he must face devastating truths about those
closest to him--and about love, sex, and power. Evoking the immigrant
experience with unsentimental precision and profound understanding,
Gravel Heart is a powerfully affecting story of isolation, identity,
belonging, and betrayal, and Abdulrazak Gurnah's most astonishing
achievement.
