THE IN-BETWEEN WORLD OF VIKRAM LALL, a novel

439pp., paperback, Reprint, Canongate, Edinburgh, (2003) 2004

ISBN: 9781841956060

Winner of the Giller Prize for fiction.

This historical novel follows the life of Vikram Lall, grandson of an Indian railroad worker, who comes of age in 1950s Kenya, during the Mau Mau guerilla war for independence from Britain. Neither colonist nor African, Vikram is torn between the pull of his ancestral home in India and the Kenya he loves; between his tragic past in Africa and an unclear future in Canada; between escape from political terror and a seemingly inevitable return home that may cost him dearly.

"One of the most impressive things about this fine novel is that it gives voice to a people some of whose forebears were in Africa before the Portuguese. It must be one of the most faithful accounts ever written about growing up through the cruel days of a guerrilla war in Africa." Christopher Hope, Daily Telegraph

“Tautly written ... Admirably captures the tenor of the postcolonial period: the predicament of the Asian minority, the corruption that marred Kenya’s fledgling independence, and the individual tragedies that were the cost of the revolution.” The New Yorker

M G Vassanji was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and raised in Tanzania. He is the author of nine novels, three collections of short stories, a travel memoir about India, a memoir of East Africa, and a biography of Mordecai Richler. His awards include the 1990 Commonwealth First Book Prize for his novel, The Gunny Sack; the 1994 Giller Prize for fiction for The Book of Secrets; the 2009 Governor General's Prize for non-fiction for his travel memoir, A Place Within: Rediscovering India, and the 2016 Canada Council Molson Prize for his body of work. He moved to Canada in 1978, currently lives in Toronto, and visits East Africa and India often.