In The Last Gift, Zanzibar-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah takes on the themes of cultural identity and the weight of family secrets. This moving novel probes the concept of self and home, guilt and exile, and the meaning of the stories we tell to answer the fundamental questions of our lives.
Abbas and Maryam met in England when she was 17 and he was 34. He was a sailor from an unidentified African country. She was abandoned as an infant, shuttled among foster parents and finally adopted by an Indian couple whose kindness masked a latent abusiveness. "Yallah, let's go," he said when they ran away together against the objections of her foster parents. But Abbas has kept the story of his origins from Maryam and their children, Jamal and Hanna, who have learned not to ask, and they bear the weight of his silence. "What I want from them is a story that has a beginning that is tolerable and open, and not one that is tripped with silences," says Hanna, who was born and raised in their small English town and feels so British that she has dropped the H from her name. "I want to be able to say 'This is who I am.' " Instead, they live with a persistent feeling of apartness and shame.
When Abbas suffers a debilitating stroke and finally reveals the circumstances behind his exile from Zanzibar, it is neither so shaming as feared nor a tidy cinematic climax that releases Gurnah's characters. Instead, it is part of the process of living an unresolvable life. Hanna in particular wants to distance herself from what she calls the "vile immigrant tragedies" of her family's past and find her own way toward some acceptance of her unaccountable heritage.
Gurnah shifts the point of view among Abbas, Maryam, Hanna and Jamal seamlessly; the transitions don't interrupt the narrative or jar the reader. Gurnah is an astute observer of human nature. His characters are complex, memorable and utterly human as they navigate the stories of their lives and find what meaning those stories have for each of them. Everyone lives inside his or her own skin, and The Last Gift is a moving, sometimes profound novel that reveals four lives inside and out. --Jeanette Zwart
Shelf Talker: A nuanced and sensitive novel about identity, memory, and exile from the Booker-shortlisted author of Paradise and the Commonwealth Prize finalist Desertion.