TEHRAN – “Paradise”, a historical novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Zanzibar-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, has come to Iranian bookstores.

Qatreh is the publisher of the book first published in 1994 by Hamish Hamilton in London. It has been translated into Persian by Behnud Farazmand.

“Paradise” is at once the story of an African boy’s coming of age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of traditional African patterns by European colonialism. 

It presents a major African voice to American readers, a voice that prompted Peter Tinniswood to write in the London Times, reviewing Gurnah’s previous novel, “Mr. Gurnah is a very fine writer. I am certain he will become a great one.” 

“Paradise” is Gurnah’s great novel. At twelve, Yusuf, the protagonist of this twentieth-century odyssey, is sold by his father in repayment of a debt. 

From the simple life of rural Africa, Yusuf is thrown into the complexities of precolonial urban East Africa, a fascinating world in which Muslim Black Africans, Christian missionaries, and Indians from the subcontinent coexist in a fragile, subtle social hierarchy. 

Through the eyes of Yusuf, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. 

Then, just as Yusuf begins to comprehend the choices required of him, he and everyone around him must adjust to the new reality of European colonialism. 

The result is a page-turning saga that covers the same territory as the novels of Isak Dinesen and William Boyd, but does so from a perspective never before available in that seldom-chronicled part of the world.

Gurnah was born in 1948 in Zanzibar and lives in England, where he teaches at the University of Kent. 

His most famous novels are “Paradise”, shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; “By the Sea”, longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and “Desertion”, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. 

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

Photo: Front cover of the Persian edition of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel “Paradise”.

MMS/YAW