MEMORY OF DEPARTURE

197pp., paperback, Reprint, London, (1987) 2021

Coming-of-age novel. Fifteen-year-old Hassan Omar leaves his East African seaport village to live with an uncle in Nairobi in the hope of escaping the poverty and depravity destroying his family.

Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. He is the author of the novels Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Dottie, Admiring SiIence, Gravel Heart, The Last Gift, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) and Afterlives (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.