
Early one morning in 1899, in a small town along the coast from Mombasa, Hassanali sets out for the mosque. But that morning he never gets there, for out of the desert stumbles an Englishman who collapses at his feet.
That man is Martin Pearce - writer, traveller and something of an Orientalist. He is taken to recuperate at the house of a colonial official, Frederick Turner. When he visits Hassanali to thank him for the rescue, he meets his sister Rehana and is immediately fascinated by her beautiful eyes and her air of tragedy. In this crumbling town on the edge of civilised life, with the empire on the brink of the new century, a passionate love affair begins that brings two cultures together and that will reverberate through three generations and across continents.
It carries its consequences to Zanzibar in the early 1950s, a country struggling with its complicated legacy of slavery and foreign rule. Here another forbidden love affair begins as Zanzibar moves inexorably towards independence - and revolution.
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Born 1948
**Abdulrazak Gurnah** FRSL (born 20 December 1948) is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; Desertion (2005); and By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents". He is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. [source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrazak_Gurnah)
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