Pilgrims Way

By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021

By: Abdulrazak Gurnah

Narrated by: Ashley Zhangazha

Bloomsbury presents Pilgrims Way by Abdulrazak Gurnah, read by Ashley Zhangazha.

By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

‘Demands to be read and reread, for its humour, generosity of spirit and clear-sighted vision’ Evening Standard

‘Gurnah zooms in on individual acts of violence ... and unexpected acts of kindness’ Daily Telegraph
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Demoralised by small persecutions and the squalor and poverty of his life, Daud takes refuge in his imagination. He composes wry, sardonic letters hectoring friends and enemies, and invents a lurid colonial past for every old man he encounters. His greatest solace is cricket and the symbolic defeat of the empire at the hands of the mighty West Indies.

Although subject to attacks of bitterness and remorse, his captivating sense of humour never deserts him as he struggles to come to terms with the horror of his past and the meaning of his pilgrimage to England.©1988 Abdulrazak Gurnah (P)2022 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Critic reviews

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 (Aminatta Forna)

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