I know I am late to the table with this book

I have to be honest I had not come across this auithor but super glad I did.

The author comes from Africa but has lived in England for most of his life. The author writes well, is beautiful and so enjoyable.

I had never read his work before, let alone, I had not even heard of him before (a sad commentary on myself). He is from Africa, Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania, but has lived most of his life in England. I am happy to say that the quality of writing is very fine.

Families as I know all too well are complicated and I too have spent time wondering why my parents did certain things - I may never know but in this story this is similar but circumstances in this story changed, with immigration to another country and far away from your family.

This gave the reader an idea of an African person life in London also.

Recommended read from a Nobel Prize winner in 2021

It took me sometime to go through this book perhaps because of the author's writing style which I found didn't flow very easily. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the protagonist's 'coming of age' story and also liked reading about Zanzibar as it gave me insight into a new country and its culture.

I enjoyed the setting of this novel, but I did find it was quite hard work to read! At times it was quite dreary and dull and I found it hard to relate to the protagonist.

This is my first book about Zanzibar . I love reading about countries and what they went through. These little gems of books that make you live and breathe with characters.

I took my time reading this book and enjoying every moment of it. I loved bibi , I know she was small part of the story but she reminded me of my mom, never complaining and doing everything for your family.
The story was told in three parts, life in Zanzibar with salim and his parents ( it starts with us seeing something happened that changed his parents and his life). Second when salim goes to uk and try to live his life but he is struggling, the last when he comes back and the author tells why? How one secret changed people lives! How power in hand of some people corrupt.

Salim time in London was disheartened, I felt he found mistakes in everything and everyone but himself. He was teenager and in foreign country. The secret of his mother and father past is still effecting his future. I felt sorry for him and worried that he will destroy his future .The book consist of a lot self reflection .
I was waiting for Salim dad story which was the start of everything. It was great to hear story telling from his point of view.
This story broke my heart, and made me angry at the same time.

At the end I Googled the author and the book, I didn’t know it was Booker prize short listed. love that I discovered new author .

I wasn't sure about this at first but the more I read the more involved I became with the story and couldn't put it down.Explores how cultural mores affect decisions made and the devastating way in which this can affect relationships , the undercurrents and the difficulty in dealing with and coming to terms with 'the elephant in the room'.

This is a novel about powerlessness-beginning in Zanzibar and meandering to the immigrant experience in Southern England. It's not a flashy book with lots of plot or particularly lush writing but nevertheless this managed to settle in my bones it seems.

An absolutely beautiful read. Thank you to the Publisher for review copy.

What a wonderful book. A small boy growing up in relative poverty in Zanzibar and being taken away to live in London. He has a difficult time and it is heartening to see him overcome his trials and tribulations although one is always sad in the belief that he will never fit in, but he makes the best of what he has. I fell in love with Salim and his underlying beliefs. A thoroughly thought provoking read

The only book by Abdulrazak Gurnah that I have previously read is Paradise, many years ago now, another book set in East Africa. This novel follows the life of Salim as he grows up in Zanzibar. Salim's father, Masud, is a distant man, living separately from his mother, Saida, for reasons which only become clear towards the end of the book. His mother's brother, Amir, lives with them and Salim adores his uncle. Amir is on the up and eventually, through his connections, is posted to the embassy in London with his family. Salim joins them to study, repayment for something Saida did for Amir years ago. As time passes the relationship between Salim & Amir changes, with Salim going his own way. The story whilst Salim is in London is often told through the medium of letters home to his mother, some sent, others left as drafts in a notebook. Like many immigrants, Salim stays on, always saying he will go home for a visit (he has the funds saved) but he does not do so until after the death of his mother. His father, who also left Zanzibar, also returns home and the background to his strange behaviour is explained on the final third of the book.

There are certain comments about colonialialism but this isn't a major theme. There is far more about corruption and the venality of post-colonial elites and the ability to intimidate to obtain compliance. What is surprising to me is that there is little analysis of the immigrant experience in England where Salim hangs out with a mainly African crowd.

I read the book on my Kindle and having read it I had assumed it would have been 450 pages long: I was surprised to find that in hardback it is only 272 pages long. It felt like it was a lot longer and at times really dragged, particularly in the first two thirds of the book. I found that once I had put it down I had to force myself to pick it up again. It proceeds at a glacially slow pace, with long explanations or great detail about things don't warrant it or which could have been dealt with more expeditiously without loss of coherence. Everything just seemed to be dragged out but this didn't serve to enhance he reveal. I just found the book dull and flat and I couldn't warm to any of the characters - Salim and his father just seem so passive, his mother mis-guided and too indulgent of her brother.

There were so many aspects of this novel that appealed to me. It is set partially in Zanzibar, a country I don't think I have ever encountered in literature and deals with a young man's move to Britain, the original coloniser of his home country. I expected an exploration of the immigrant experience and the legacy of colonialism and while these themes were present they were dealt with in a way that left me surprisingly unmoved.

Much of this can be attributed to the strangely reserved writing in which so many interactions and events are simply reported by the narrator that it left me feeling very little connection to the story. Even Salim himself came into focus only occasionally through the letters he wrote and rewrote to his parents in Zanzibar and Kuala Lumpur but these were brief glimpses between long narrative passages in which his personality again retreated into obscurity. Aside from Salim all of the other players appeared more as set decoration with very little to distinguish them. Rarely speaking directly and little described they felt tangential to the story and often to Salim's life.

A sense of place is also strangely absent. Physical descriptions of Zanzibar and London are as fleeting and colourless as the descriptions of the characters. That is until towards the end when there is a plunge into the history and crimes of colonialism. This is so sudden and so weighty it is something of a shock since apart from short asides and brief glimpses I found this issue largely and regrettably unexplored in the rest of the novel.

Perhaps all of this was deliberate and intended to express Salim's isolation, his restlessness and rootlessness but it robbed the story of impact and made it rather unmemorable.

http://www.themodernnovel.org/africa/other-africa/tanzania/gurnah/gravel-heart/
http://www.themodernnovelblog.com/2017/04/26/abdulrazak-gurnah-gravel-heart/

I was first introduced to the work of Abdulrazak Gurnah whilst studying for my MA in English with The Open University. Paradise was one of the set books and I really enjoyed it (despite having to write an assignment about it). So I was keen to read Gravel Heart when I saw the title on NetGalley.

Gurnah returns to some familiar themes: colonialism (especially British), the importance of stories (telling, retelling and withholding), displacement, the conflict between modernity and tradition and the notion that history is (re)written by the victor.

In Part 1, Gurnah skilfully puts the reader inside the mind of a young boy, Salim, who picks up nuggets of information about his family history but does not fully understand them and who observes things but does not understand precisely what he is seeing or the true nature of the relationship of the people involved.

‘It had taken me a long time to add things up because I was an inept and unworldly child with eyes only for books. Nobody taught me to see the vileness of things and I saw like an idiot, understanding nothing.’

This includes the reason for his father’s separation from his mother and why his father lives alone seemingly overwhelmed by despondency. The full picture will only be revealed at the end of the novel.

Part 2 covers Salim’s experience of living in England and his persistent feeling of being on the edge, of being an outsider and being in unfamiliar surroundings: ‘I tried but could not join in the city’s human carnival.’ Even the supermarket shelves are a source of strange, new things.

‘Everything was new and sometimes surprising...What a good idea, I would think, as I learnt the use of this or that.’

In England, Salim begins to see the true nature of Uncle Amir whose jokes and smiles, it becomes apparent, mask less attractive character traits.

In the final part, Salim at long last learns what happened between his father and mother in a tale told by his father over a number of nights, in the manner of The Arabian Nights.

As with Paradise, in Gravel Heart, the reader is transported to another culture and fascinating insights into life in Zanzibar. However, I found it difficult at times to understand fully Salim’s actions - or rather his lack of action - and his diffidence.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of NetGalley and publishers, Bloomsbury, in return for an honest review.