Gravel Heart

[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 * Guardian *
Gurnah is a master storyteller -- Aminatta Forna * Financial Times *
Gurnah writes with wonderful insight about family relationships and he folds in the layers of history with elegance and warmth * The Times *
Exile has given Gurnah a perspective on the “balance between things” that is astonishing, superb * Observer *
Gurnah etches with biting incisiveness the experiences of immigrants exposed to contempt, hostility or patronising indifference on their arrival in Britain * Spectator *
Gurnah writes with quiet humour and great affection about pre-revolutionary Zanzibar and its people … Gurnah writes beautifully, with the satisfying assurance of someone who knows how to achieve his effects without undue fuss but with absolute precision * Daily Telegraph *
Gurnah evokes his world in poetic prose which is pure and lucid * Guardian *
His prose is elegant and evocative * Mail on Sunday *
Gurnah has laid powerful imaginative claim to the eastern seaboard of Africa * Independent *
Gravel Heart is one of the beautiful novels that lingers in the mind long after reading. Gurnah writes about the clash of worlds with such pathos and elegance. -- Amanda Foreman
Glittering...Each work is different from the last, yet they build into a powerfully evocative oeuvre that keeps coming back to the same questions, in spare, graceful prose, about the ties that bind and the ties that fray -- Judith Woods * Daily Telegraph *
Entertainingly intertwines migration and a tale of family drama ... Gurnah has rightly been praised for his masterful storytelling ... An emotive tale about betrayal, families and the East African diaspora -- Theresa Munoz * Sunday Herald *
A colourful tale of lie in a Zanzibar village, where passions and politics reshape a family ... Expect echoes of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure -- Jeffery Burke * Mail on Sunday *
Throughout, the elegance and control of Gurnah’s writing, and his understanding of how quietly and slowly and repeatedly a heart can break, make this a deeply rewarding novel * Guardian *
The measured elegance of Gurnah’s prose renders his protagonist in a manner almost uncannily real … Gurnah’s portrayal of student immigrant life in Britain is pleasingly deliberate and precise, and also riveting … Even the minor characters in this novel have richly imagined histories that inflect their smallest interactions – one of the loveliest pleasures of this book, and a choice that makes its world exceptionally full * New York Times *
A poignant, understated and frequently moving novel * Herald *