Paradise

Yusuf is a boy from the small settlement of Kawa when his father, unable to repay a debt, hands him over to Aziz, a wealthy merchant, to work off what is owed, and Abdulrazak Gurnah follows him from there into an East Africa still on the edge of full European colonization in the early years of the twentieth century. Yusuf grows up effectively as Aziz's unpaid servant, eventually joining one of the merchant's long trading caravans into the interior west of Lake Tanganyika, a journey Gurnah renders through hostile local populations, wild animals and difficult terrain rather than as any kind of adventure story, before the surviving traders make their way back to the coast.

Back at Aziz's household, Yusuf becomes caught between two of the merchant's wives. The older, ailing wife believes the young man can heal her and draws him into her evening company, while Yusuf is himself drawn to Aziz's much younger second wife. When he refuses the older wife's advances, she accuses him of assault, and only Aziz's return before the accusation can do lasting damage saves Yusuf from it, an escape that leaves him pledging a devotion to his employer that reads as much like resignation as loyalty. The title's paradise, a walled garden inside the household compound that Yusuf is allowed to tend, becomes the novel's bitterest joke, a small, enclosed beauty inside a life that otherwise offers him none of paradise's freedom.

As German colonial forces begin conscripting local men during the First World War, Yusuf, disgusted with a servitude he can no longer accept, runs after the departing German soldiers rather than staying behind, an ending Gurnah leaves genuinely ambiguous about whether this counts as escape or merely a different captivity. Reading it means watching one young life absorb, without much say in the matter, the full collision of Arab trade networks, African societies and arriving European power, and it suits a reader drawn to colonial history told through a single, largely powerless witness to it.