Paradise.

London: Hamish Hamilton,, 1994. Inscribed by the future Nobel laureate First edition, first impression, inscribed on the title page, in the year of publication, by the Nobel Prize-winning author, "To Joel, with best wishes Abdulrazak 22.4.94". This was Gurnah's breakthrough novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker and Whitbread prizes, and which explores the effects of colonialism in early 20th-century East Africa through the eyes of a child protagonist. The Independent reviewed the book as "many-layered, violent, beautiful and strange. It incorporates its disparate elements - myth, folktale, Biblical and Koranic tradition, a strong whiff of Conrad - without a dilution of its essence. Not the least of its many achievements is the bleak economy and finely judged distance with which it evokes the evils of colonialism". Gurnah's sustained success was internationally recognized in 2021 upon his receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents". Octavo. Original blue boards, spine lettered in gilt. With dust jacket. Spine ends bumped, contents fresh; bright jacket with minor edge creasing, unclipped: a near-fine copy in like jacket. Anita Mason, review in The Independent, 13 March 1994.