Desertion Book Cover

Desertion


A Literary Fiction Novel


Subgenres:

  • Historical Fiction,
  • Colonial Africa,
  • Multi-Generational
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This book is for you if you're into...

  • Forbidden love stories set against British colonial rule in East Africa
  • Generational consequences that echo through decades and shifting political landscapes
  • Historical fiction exploring the personal cost of empire and independence
Publisher Description

A masterwork by the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, in which the consequences of an illicit love affair reverberate from the heyday of the British empire to the aftermath of African independence.

Early one morning in 1899, an Englishman named Martin Pearce stumbles out of the desert into an East African coastal town and collapses at the feet of Hassanali, a local shopkeeper. When Hassanali's sister, the beautiful and disillusioned Rehana, nurses Pearce back to health, a love affair sparks, with consequences that will ripple decades into the future, when another clandestine affair bursts into flame, with equally unforeseen and dramatic consequences.

In this devastating and ingeniously spun tale, the Nobelist Abdulrazak Gurnah brilliantly dramatizes the personal and political legacies of colonialism.

More Abdulrazak Gurnah

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