Abdulrazak Gurnah's 6 favorite books about war and colonialism

In 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. In Theft, his first novel since he won the award, a teenage servant in Dar es Salaam is accused of stealing, but finds a way forward in the company of two other young people on uncertain paths.

‘Maps’ by Nuruddin Farah (1986)

This is Nuruddin Farah’s most powerful novel. As with all of his fiction, it is set in his homeland of Somalia. Maps is an absorbing account of an orphaned boy growing up among women during the Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia. It is a poetic and superbly organized work. Buy it here.

‘The English Patient’ by Michael Ondaatje (1992)

The English Patient is a novel of many achievements. Its location is a ruined monastery turned abandoned military hospital in Italy toward the end of World War II. It has one solitary patient who is seriously burned and too fragile to move. The novel’s imaginary landscape is vast, and includes espionage, wartime Cairo, desert exploration, and a devastating love affair. Buy it here.

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‘The Convoy’ by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse (2024)

Mairesse’s new memoir, available from Open Borders Press in London, is a moving and powerful account of the violence of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the aftermath for the survivors. Its descriptions of the terrors of her days in hiding is unforgettable. Buy it here.

‘Song of Solomon’ by Toni Morrison (1977)

The language of Morrison’s third novel astounds from its first pages to its triumphant conclusion. Its story of Macon Dead’s turbulent journey to his ancestral beginnings in the South is an epic of the African-American experience. Buy it here.

‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ by J.M. Coetzee (1980)

The narrator of Waiting for the Barbarians is a liberal man in his own estimation and a magistrate in a frontier town. The setting is precise in physical details, but its location is not named. However, it is difficult not to see the novel as a parable of apartheid South Africa and the dilemma of the liberal in that context, who is driven by a desire for reprieve but whose gesture made to achieve it is ineffectual. A work of great accomplishment. Buy it here.

‘Celestial Bodies’ by Jokha Alharthi (2010)

This is the story of three sisters growing into adulthood as Oman transforms from an austere patriarchal society into a new vibrancy. The novel’s impact comes from an unforced elegant prose and a delicately balanced structure. Buy it here.