Travellers
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'Once I started reading Travellers, I couldn't stop. With power and control, it plunges the reader into a maze of lives that crisscross between Africa and Europe. Refugees and not only refugees hungering for the north, pushing their way through the barriers of waves, human failings and unrealistic dreams.The novel has all the weight of art with the sting of breaking news. I loved it. It is Habila at his best' Leila Aboulela
Poignant and beautifully sculpted, a novel about exile, identity and the many kinds of travellers moving through our modern world - from the Caine Prize-winning author of Oil on Water and Waiting for an Angel
Modern Europe is a melting pot of migrating souls: among them a Nigerian American couple on a prestigious arts fellowship, a transgender film student seeking the freedom of authenticity, a Libyan doctor who lost his wife and child in the waters of the Mediterranean, and a Somalian shopkeeper trying to save his young daughter from forced marriage. And, though the divide between the self-chosen exiles and those who are forced to leave home may feel solid, in reality such boundaries are endlessly shifting and frighteningly soluble.
Moving from a Berlin nightclub to a Sicilian refugee camp to the London apartment of a Malawian poet, Helon Habila evokes a rich mosaic of migrant experiences. And through his characters' interconnecting fates, he traces the extraordinary pilgrimages we all might make in pursuit of home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The plight of contemporary African refugees is the dramatic core of this moving tale. The nameless narrator of the book's opening (the novel is divided into six sections with different characters, but the narrator connects all of them) is a native Nigerian finishing work on his dissertation, who accompanies his American wife on her art fellowship to Berlin. While she paints, he falls in with a community of students who hail from Malawi, Senegal, and other African nations. Through the characters' friendships and associations, Habila (The Chibok Girls) relates the stories of a number of asylum seekers who fled wretched circumstances and now face uncertain prospects (among them a former doctor working in Berlin as a nightclub bouncer and a man who escaped with his family from an armed Somalian rebel who was determined to marry the man's 10-year-old daughter). The narrator comes to know the depths of their desperation himself when, returning from Switzerland, he loses his papers and is deported to a refugee camp in Italy. "Where am I? Who am I? How did I get here?" cries one refugee, summing up the sense of dislocation and loss of identity they all feel, yet Habila never presents them as objects of pity, but rather as exemplars of human resilience. Readers will find this novel a potent tale for these times.
