Theft
By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
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- 16,99 €
Publisher Description
**Selected as a Book of the Summer 2025 by the Guardian, Financial Times, Granta, Economist and the BBC**
**Selected as a book of the year 2025 by the Financial Times and Time Magazine**
The new novel from the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature - 'a maestro' (Guardian). A captivating story of the intertwined lives of three young people coming-of-age in postcolonial East Africa
'A poignant portrait of love, friendship and betrayal' Guardian
'Storytelling mastery' Observer
'A piece of great, satisfying storytelling to lose yourself in' Samantha Harvey, Guardian Books of the Summer
'The reader can only rejoice at Gurnah's skill in giving us the whole of a life in such nimble scenes' Financial Times
'Another glittering tapestry of a novel from a master storyteller of our times' Irish Times
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What are we given, and what do we have to take for ourselves?
It is the 1990s. Growing up in Zanzibar, three very different young people – Karim, Fauzia and Badar – are coming of age, and dreaming of great possibilities in their young nation. But for Badar, an uneducated servant boy who has never known his parents, it seems as if all doors are closed.
Brought into a lowly position in a great house in Dar es Salaam, Badar finds the first true home of his life – and the friendship of Karim, the young man of the house. Even when a shattering false accusation sees Badar sent away, Karim and Fauzia refuse to turn away from their friend.
But as the three of them take their first steps in love, infatuation, work and parenthood, their bond is tested – and Karim is tempted into a betrayal that will change all of their lives forever.
'In reading this wise new novel, we the readers become a bit more ready to understand what it means to be human' Elif Shafak, New Statesman
'Storytelling mastery, at once coming-of-age chamber piece and wide-angled post-colonial panorama … narrated in a quicksilver style that gives you the pleasurable sense that you're putty in the hands of a warm yet clear-eyed authorial intelligence' Observer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two Tanzanian men, abandoned as boys, forge their own paths in this incisive novel by Nobel Prize winner Gurnah (Afterlives). Karim's Muslim parents divorce when he is a boy. His mother, Raya, feels no affection for him, and abandons him to her father after falling in love with a man named Haji Othman. Years later, Badar, a 10-year-old orphan boy, enters the Othman household as a domestic servant for Raya, who's now married to Haji. As the novel unfolds, Badar is revealed to be Haji's nephew, cast off by his wayward brother and hated by Baba, the household's elderly and devout patriarch. Karim becomes aware of Badar's plight during a visit home from university, when Badar is 15. Two years later, when Baba suspects Badar of stealing groceries on the family's credit, he instructs Haji to banish the teenager. Badar goes to live with Karim, now a married low-level bureaucrat in Zanzibar, and both men rise through the ranks of their respective fields, with Badar's hotel busboy job leading to an assistant manager position and Karim on track to become a government minister. By the novel's end, their series of cosmopolitan encounters have driven one to abandon his Tanzanian identity and the other to reinvest in it. Written in lucid prose, Gurnah's tale is at once culturally specific and emotionally universal, especially in depicting Badar's heartache as a boy and the strangeness of his arrangement with the Othman household as seen from Karim's point of view. Gurnah is at the top of his game.
