Last Gift

Abbas has never told anyone about his past. He has said nothing of the time before he became a sailor on the high seas, before he met his wife Maryam outside a Boots in Exeter, and before the couple settled into a quiet life in Norwich with their children, Jamal and Hanna.

Now, at sixty-three, Abbas suffers a collapse that leaves him bedbound and unable to speak about the things he always assumed he would one day have to explain.

Last Gift is a novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, a writer born in Zanzibar who settled in England and who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021.