Pilgrims Way

An extraordinary depiction of the life of an immigrant, as he struggles to come to terms with the horror of his past and the meaning of his pilgrimage to England

Exile has given Gurnah a perspective on the “balance between things” that is astonishing, superb

[A] captivating storyteller , with a voice both lyrical and mordant, and an oeuvre haunted by memory and loss. His intricate novels of arrival and departure … reveal, with flashes of acerbic humour, the lingering ties that bind continents, and how competing versions of history collide

Gurnah is a master storyteller

Gurnah etches with biting incisiveness the experiences of immigrants exposed to contempt, hostility or patronising indifference on their arrival in Britain

Gurnah writes with wonderful insight about family relationships and he folds in the layers of history with elegance and warmth

Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. He is the author of ten novels: Memory of Departure , Pilgrims Way , Dottie , Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence , By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) The Last Gift , Gravel Heart , and Afterlives , which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. He was Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury.