num_pages: 247
description: 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.”
language: English
title: Paradise: By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021
titlecomplete: Paradise: By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021
genres: 20th Century, Historical Fiction, Nobel Prize, Africa, Tanzania, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Fiction, African Literature
ratings_count: 8520
places: Tanzania, Africa, East Africa
awards: awardedAt: 757411200000
name: Booker Prize, awardedAt: 757411200000
name: Whitbread Award
publisher: The New Press