Gravel Heart

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639730018
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	10/12/2021
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	516,255
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. He is the author of ten novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) The Last Gift, Gravel Heart, and Afterlives, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. He was Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury.

Editorial Reviews

The measured elegance of Gurnah's prose renders his protagonist in a manner almost uncannily real . . . Gurnah's portrayal of student immigrant life in Britain is pleasingly deliberate and precise, and also riveting . . . Even the minor characters in this novel have richly imagined histories that inflect their smallest interactions—one of the loveliest pleasures of this book, and a choice that makes its world exceptionally full.” —New York Times Book Review

“The elegance and control of Gurnah's writing, and his understanding of how quietly and slowly and repeatedly a heart can break, make this a deeply rewarding novel.” —The Guardian

“What sets Gravel Heart apart from the many other books on the immigrant experience are Gurnah's deeper themes . . . Gravel Heart is much more than the story of a boy trying to uncover his family's secret. Ultimately, it's a story about trying find one's place in the world—and that's something we can all to relate to.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

From the Publisher

The measured elegance of Gurnah's prose renders his protagonist in a manner almost uncannily real, in part because the author does not elide the young man's transience, but instead makes its slow impact on his life a genuine focus of the story…Gurnah's portrayal of student immigrant life in Britain is pleasingly deliberate and precise, and also riveting…Even the minor characters in this novel have richly imagined histories that inflect their smallest interactions—one of the loveliest pleasures of this book, and a choice that makes its world exceptionally full.

The New York Times Book Review - V. V. Ganeshananthan

06/12/2017
Not until over a hundred pages into this novel does Salim, the narrator whose life we follow and whose thoughts we inhabit, say out loud to anyone in his adopted country where he’s from: Zanzibar, a small island off the east coast of Africa. The conversation in which this information is revealed takes place in Brighton, England, where Salim has moved after three years in London in order to start over. First brought to England after high school by his wealthy ambassador uncle, Salim floundered in business school and so resolved to make the life he wanted, studying literature and living alone even though it meant supporting himself. The first third of the novel reflects the almost entirely interior world of Salim’s upbringing in a tiny house in Zanzibar, carefully observing the adults around him. An observant and dutiful child, Salim is bewildered when his father leaves home and becomes a shadow of his former self, living across town. At age 11, Salim begins bringing his father a basket lunch every day, “like taking food to a prisoner.” Once Salim is in his 30s, the events behind his father’s leaving and his mother’s continued dedication to her husband become clear, the result of a corrupt government official and impossible choices no one should have had to make. Although the book is slow to start, Gurnah (By the Sea) finds a beautiful, quiet, contemplative tone in which to describe and reflect on Salim’s experiences of displacement and discovery. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

07/01/2017
At the core of this novel by Gurnah (By the Sea and Paradise) is a family secret that young Salim must discover in order to be at peace with himself. Every afternoon, his mother asks him to take a basket of food to his father, who lives as an impoverished recluse in a shopkeeper's back room a short distance away and mutters only a word of thanks for the meal. Salim's mother refuses to answer her son's questions about this family situation. Years later, Salim attends university in London, eventually returning home to Zanzibar and visiting his father in the same hovel where he last saw him. Over the course of several days, Salim's father finally confides to his son the dark secret that keeps him estranged from his wife and children. Without sentimentality, the author imparts an affecting story of isolation, the search for identity, and loneliness at home, as well as in the large, hostile capital of a foreign nation where Salim is clearly not wanted. VERDICT Though it would have benefited from some tightening to make the narrative to flow more smoothly, this novel is ultimately compelling, drawing the reader directly into the life of young Salim and his pursuit of answers and understanding. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.]—Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

Library Journal

2017-06-06
A boy searches for answers, home, his identity, and his destiny after mysterious family circumstances transplant him from his native Zanzibar to London.A veteran novelist who was born in Zanzibar and has long been a professor of literature in England, Gurnah (The Last Gift, 2014, etc.) offers a first-person narrative involving rites of passage for a character whose circumstances are similar to his own. At a pivotal point the narrator says, "I felt like a character at the end of a novel on his way to adventure and fulfilment." Not so fast, for the protagonist has barely made his way through a third of this tale, and fulfillment might not be a realistic expectation. What little he's learned about the world has come from reading novels, a passion he inherited from his father, who has abandoned the household in something resembling disgrace, with the son sent to England to study business under the patronage of his more worldly, glamorous uncle. "Something broke in my father's life a long time ago and I was the debris of [my parents'] disordered lives," says Salim, as he has belatedly introduced himself. The source of this disorder remains a mystery to Salim even after the birth of a sister whose father could not possibly be his. He angers his uncle by rejecting business for the study of literature and finds a measure of independence as he experiences a sexual awakening. Yet his mother's death brings him back to a very different Zanzibar, post-revolutionary and now teeming with tourists. His father, who had been all but silent throughout his son's narration, now feels himself compelled to illuminate the dark secrets that have split his family, and he does so through a series of chapters that function almost like soliloquies, letting Salim know what his mother did and why. Like a lot of similar fiction, this well-crafted novel finds its protagonist suspended between two cultures, a part of each yet apart from both.

Kirkus Reviews