From the Nobel Prize winner, a coming-of-age story that illuminates
the harshness and beauty of an Africa on the brink of colonization
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was
characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnah's
"breakthrough" work. It is at once the chronicle of an African boy's
coming-of-age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of
African tradition by European colonialism.
Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, twelve-year-old Yusuf is
thrown from his simple rural life into complexities of pre-colonial
urban East Africa. Through Yusuf's eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at
war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence.
The result is what Publishers Weekly calls a "vibrant" and "powerful"
work that "evokes the Edenic natural beauty of a continent on the verge
of full-scale imperialist takeover."