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Gravel Heart

  • Abdulrazak Gurnah

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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.

Genres

  • Tanzanians
  • Fiction
  • London (england), fiction
  • Fiction, general
  • Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
  • FICTION
  • Literary
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About the author

  • Abdulrazak Gurnah

    born 20 December 1948

    4.00

    11 ratings · 37 works

Editions

  • Edition cover

    Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

    2017

  • Edition cover

    Bloomsbury Publishing USA, Bloomsbury Adult

    2021

  • Edition cover

    First U.S. edition.

    2017

  • Edition cover

    Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

    2017

Edition cover

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

2017

  • Edition cover

    Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

    2018

  • Edition cover

    Bloomsbury Publishing USA

    2017

  • Edition cover

    Bloomsbury Publishing

    21 May 2018