RaveThe Guardian (UK)Riveting, sprawling ... Reveals some of the contradictions of living in a colonised, segregated society ... The psychological and emotional growth that could have fostered deeper understandings and greater revelations remains unexplored. Verghese chooses instead to reckon with biological realities ... This is a novel – a splendid, enthralling one – about the body, about what characters inherit and what makes itself felt upon them ... Contains a larger question of community and belonging, one that feels most important in these days of escalating political wars and tensions: is it possible to be fragile and wounded, and still necessary and loved? The answer is rendered with care by a writer who looks at the world with a doctor’s knowing, merciful gaze.
Abdulrazak Gurnah
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)... sprawling yet intimate ... Hamza’s story is the most compelling and disturbing in the novel, laying bare the abusive and complex desires that shape the intimate relationship between oppressor and oppressed ... Gurnah does not shy away from the psychologically complicated encounters. He exhibits the same patience and care that he shows to all his characters as he follows Hamza through the war, guiding us expertly into deeper contemplations of Christianity’s role in the drive to build and maintain a colonial empire. And through Hamza and Afiya, he provides a window on to the restorative potential of trust and love ... In a world that uses the destructive eruptions of warfare as markers of history, Gurnah shows us a global conflict from the point of view of those who decided to look towards each other, and live. This is why, perhaps, the end feels abrupt. Building to a riveting and heartbreaking climax, the last chapters holds us enthralled, as Gurnah’s defiant act of reclamation reaches its poignant conclusion. But it is too sudden. It is hard not to wish that the story could slow down and allow us an intimate portrait of Ilyas’s later years – that we could linger here as we do with the other characters. Despite that, Afterlives is a compelling novel, one that gathers close all those who were meant to be forgotten, and refuses their erasure.
Yaa Gyasi
RaveThe Boston Globe... profoundly moving ... Through deliberate and precise prose, the book becomes an expansive meditation on grief, religion, and family. But it is also a sensitively rendered examination of mental illness and addiction, and the uneasy space these inhabit in an African immigrant family ... There were many directions this premise could have taken. It could have pivoted around the racism that she and her family had to endure from the community as a whole and from their fellow church members. But what Gyasi does is drag that other monstrous affliction, drug addiction, into the light and what unfolds is an unexpected and revelatory examination of its many destructive consequences — including mental illness — for a Black family in a predominantly white town ... This novel, meticulous and compassionate in its inquiries, brings us intimately close to that suffering, and then asks us not to look away.
