The receipt of a big award inevitably ramps up the pressure on whatever the winner publishes next, but there can be no such fears over Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new novel, Theft, his first since becoming a Nobel laureate in 2021. Set between his birthplace, Zanzibar, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it’s a quietly powerful demonstration of storytelling mastery, at once coming-of-age chamber piece and wide-angled postcolonial panorama, pegged to the inner lives of its central trio – all teenagers followed into adulthood. Meanwhile, sketched between the lines, is family heartache spread over several generations, all 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.
It begins by tracing the marital misery that led to one of its characters, Karim, growing up under the eye of a stepbrother who nurtures his ambition to go to university. His story is twined with the unexplained arrival of a younger boy, Badar, an orphan seemingly taken into servitude in Karim’s well-off household; a murky arrangement considered payback for an ancestral wrong alluded to in the book’s title, and a state of affairs that unsurprisingly lights a slow-burn fuse of envy, suspicion and resentment.
