Feb 2025- Diaspora Reads - African Book Club meeting

Title: After Lives (320 pages)
Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Represent, Represent: East Africa
Time period: East Africa, early 20th century

THANK you to member Raya for this recommendation.

Please read BEFORE the meeting so the discussion is focused on the book and the Yes RSVPs will be given the password in the days before, check your email. This is a required cameras-on safe space.

From the website:
While he was still a little boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the German colonial troops. After years away, fighting in a war against his own people, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away.

Another young man returns at the same time. Hamza was not stolen for the war, but sold into it; he has grown up at the right hand of an officer whose protection has marked him life. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he seeks only work and security – and the love of the beautiful Afiya.

As fate knots these young people together, as they live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war on another continent lengthens and darkens, ready to snatch them up and carry them away…

About the author:
Mr. Gurnah was born in Zanzibar and teaches at University of Kent, England. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for this book in 2021 "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents".