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By the Sea

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By the Sea

By: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Narrated by: Connie Mgadzah, Denver Isaac
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About this listen

Bloomsbury presents By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah, read by Connie MGadzah and Denver Isaac.

By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

'One scarcely dares breathe while reading it for fear of breaking the enchantment' The Times

‘Gurnah is a master storyteller' Financial Times

On a late November afternoon Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport from Zanzibar, a far away island in the Indian Ocean. With him he has a small bag in which lies his most precious possession – a mahogany box containing incense. He used to own a furniture shop, have a house and be a husband and father. Now he is an asylum seeker from paradise; silence his only protection.

Meanwhile Latif Mahmud, someone intimately connected with Saleh's past, lives quietly alone in his London flat. When Saleh and Latif meet in an English seaside town, a story is unravelled. It is a story of love and betrayal, seduction and possession, and of a people desperately trying to find stability amidst the maelstrom of their times.

©2001 Abdulrazak Gurnah (P)2022 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Fiction Friendship Genre Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature Africa

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Critic reviews

"Rarely in a lifetime can you open a book and find that reading it encapsulates the enchanting qualities of a love affair...one scarcely dares breathe while reading it for fear of breaking the enchantment." (The Times)

"Gurnah is a master storyteller." (Financial Times)
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This is the 6th book that I have read by this author and I loved it, just as all the others. Intertwining personal stories set in factual historical contexts is his speciality. His descriptions engage all my senses and the characters come across as complex and authentic.

Another brilliant book by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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Another great read from this author, which just made me want to discover more of his works. Really enjoyed it.

Moving and thought provoking

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This book has two narrative voices and the audio uses a different actor for each. Unfortunately, one of these actors is very much better informed about pronunciation than the other, which makes the Latif section (the middle part of the book) rather less convincingly performed than the sections voiced by Saleh. I am not 100% sure which actor is voicing which, character although assuming they are named in the order of appearance (since they are not listed alphabetically), the Latif section would seem to be Denver Isaac, Some of the issues are with word stress, (paraBOla, for example) and I might have just assumed this is a difference in regional English (the character is from East Africa), but there were simple errors too, with 'scarred' given as 'scared' and, at one point, 1984 given as 1948, so I think it's just misreading and inattention to detail. This is a shame, as the character is meant to be a rather well-read and punctilious university academic, who simply wouldn't make such errors in English.

This aside, the two voices are both beautifully pitched and modulated and Mgadzah (who some listeners will recognize from Radio 4's 'The Archers'), if he is indeed the Saleh character, is a fine and reliable reader of Gurnah's prose. Since Saleh has the bulk of the narration, the majority of the audio is very good indeed.

One voice better than the other

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