Superb A celebration of a place and time when people held onto their own ways and basked in ordinary joys even as outside forces conspired to take them away New York Times

From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature a sweeping multigenerational saga of displacement loss and love set against the brutal colonization of east Africa

When he was just a boy Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops After years away fighting against his own people he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister Afiya abandoned into de facto slavery Hamza too returns home from the war scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his backuntil he meets the beautiful undaunted Afiya As these young people live and work and fall in love their fates knotted ever more tightly together the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them threatening once again to carry them away