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Wall Street Journal
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Fiction: Abdulrazak Gurnah's ‘Theft'
In Abdulrazak Gurnah's 'Theft' (Riverhead, 304 pages, $30), a Tanzanian servant named Badar is listening to an anecdote being told by an older friend, the house's gardener. Impatient with the gardener's digressions, Badar tries to jump ahead to the point of the story, only to be smilingly admonished. 'Don't be in such a hurry,' the gardener says. 'Many things happened. That's how it is in life, many things happen.' That's also how it tends to be in Mr. Gurnah's novels, of which 'Theft' is the 11th—and the first since the Tanzanian-British author was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021. Taking place from the 1990s into the 2010s, the book traces the intersecting lives of two men and a woman. The focus of the initial chapters is Karim, who overcomes a neglectful childhood by excelling in his studies, emerging as an up-and-coming government official in charge of environmental programs in the island city of Zanzibar. A marker of Karim's success is his marriage to Fauzia, an aspiring teacher whose path we follow from her own high-achieving student days. The cloud over Fauzia's happiness is her epilepsy, which she fears she will pass on to her children. Separate from the couple, yet soon entwined in their lives, is Badar, who is sent at age 13 from his farming village to Dar es Salaam, a city on the mainland, to work as a servant for Karim's mother and stepfather. Though Badar grasps that there is 'something degraded about his circumstances,' his honesty and self-possession make him an esteemed member of the household. When events conspire to take him to live with Karim and Fauzia in Zanzibar, he finds work at a tourist hotel, and his status—dependent or a friend?—grows blurrier. 'To himself he said ruefully, Once a servant, always a servant, but it did not feel like that,' writes Mr. Gurnah, a characteristically simple phrase suggesting vast emotions. In his sensitive and cheerfully unrushed fashion, Mr. Gurnah advances the trajectories of the trio to explore the mutable nature of family. There is an upstairs-downstairs story in 'Theft,' which fruitfully explores the meanings of work and love from Karim's and Badar's different points of view. The novel is also attuned to the influence of Tanzania's political evolution on the characters' private lives (Westerners from relief organizations gradually intrude on more and more of the narrative).
New York Times
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Best New Thriller Novels
What would you do if your beloved, thoughtful husband inexplicably grabbed a gun, took some strangers hostage in a warehouse and instigated a tense standoff with the police? 'Tell my wife that I love her,' the husband, Luke, tells a police negotiator before shooting two of the hostages to death and escaping out the back, seemingly never to be seen again. After this delectably unlikely opening, McAllister's latest domestic stress-fest, FAMOUS LAST WORDS (Morrow, 369 pp., $30), jumps ahead seven years. Luke has not been heard from all this time; the dead hostages have never been identified; and Luke's wife, Cam, a literary agent (and part-time narrator of the book), is trying to distract herself with Charlie, a nice guy she's dated a few times. But she can't believe her once loving husband is gone for good, or that he's really an assassin. 'Sometimes, Cam thinks she sees him,' McAllister writes. There are strange happenings, like a cryptic text she receives consisting of a long string of numbers. Is Luke trying to communicate with her? And what about the clues being uncovered by the former police negotiator in the case, Niall, who has never gotten over what happened and still dreams of solving the mystery? The pieces of the puzzle emerge slowly, but they come together very nicely. A bonus: the chance to read excerpts from a new thriller submitted by one of Cam's clients, which form part of the book. 'It's so delicious, the slide into make-believe,' McAllister writes, and she could be describing us as well as herself. 'She can almost feel it on her skin like a warm embrace.' Binge thoroughly unsettled readers with his last book, 'Ascension,' an unusual account of a massive mountain that inexplicably appeared in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In DISSOLUTION (Riverhead, 372 pp., $30), he messes with our heads once more. This chronology-hopping work of speculative fiction about time, memory and scientists run amok is suspenseful, provocative and surprisingly tender. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Boston Globe
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A train goes off the rails in Paris, and we get vivid portraits of the people onboard
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In ' Advertisement 'I loved setting myself a sort of discipline of trying to find as many real people as possible who were in France in the 1890s and saying, what if they were on my train, how might their day have gone?' Donoghue says. 'I didn't have to go to any great lengths to try and make the range of characters diverse — 1890s Paris was this international hub. It was just like a casting call of lively people. It was lovely to sort of pay homage to the city.' Emma Donoghue will read at 5 p.m. on Monday, March 17, at in South Hadley. And now for some recommendations . . . Advertisement Scarily relevant, Clay Risen's ' ' (Scribner) transports readers back to the witch hunts of the early 1950s. America had led the Allies to victory over the Nazis, but alongside postwar peace and prosperity the country grappled with paranoid conspiracies that saw enemies everywhere. Risen, a New York Times journalist, vividly recalls an era that may feel all-too-familiar. In ' ' (Riverhead), his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah revisits his native Tanzania to tell the interlocking stories of three young people whose lives are on the brink of transformation. Another thoughtful and deeply moving book by a master storyteller. Stephen Graham Jones has a growing fanbase that includes fellow writers like Tommy Orange and Stephen King. In ' ' (Simon & Schuster), his latest, Jones blends horror and history to tell the story of a vampire who walks the lands of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, seeking revenge for a massacre by whites that left 217 Blackfeet dead. ' ' (One World) by Nicole Cuffy is a gorgeously written literary excavation of belonging and belief. The novel toggles between the narrative of a bereaved young man who finds himself drawn into a community that may be a cult and the mysterious leader whose own history was indelibly marked by his time serving in the American military during the Vietnam War. Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section. Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at
