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Title: The Last Gift

Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah

Narrator: Lyndam Gregory

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-07-11

Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

One day long ago, Abbas slipped away without saying a word and never went back. And then another day, 43 years later, he collapsed by the front door of his house in a small English town. He has never told anyone about his past, and now Abbas is incapable of speech. His illness brings home his children Jamal and Hanna; and amidst the dark silence, the truth seeps out. Moving from Africa to Britain and across the seas between, Gurnah explores how our lives are shaped by the places and secrets of our past.

Members Reviews:

In the glass come see your face

This is a novel of discovery, revelation, and guilt. I recommend it in the way that I recommend Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih: the novels are profound but elusive. They reveal the pain of dislocation; in the guise of immigrant stories they demonstrate how difficult it is to explain self, to be loyal to memory, and to discern what elements of shared existence really matter. Abbas is from a small village on Zanzibar who flees an awkward situation, but we do not know that until half way into the novel. Maryam is a foundling, fostered by an Indian couple who start to treat her as a servant. They meet and start a life with daughter Hannah and son Jamal. But who are these people, and does the past really define them?

You can search previous pages to find my comments on other of Gurnahâs novels, and I am now starting to think that he writes them to explain himself, to his readers and to himself. Many TEAArs taught on the coast,. and I think that you especially will enjoy Gurnahâs novels and perhaps deliberate on some level what will be your last gift (cf, the ending to Ellisonâs Invisible Man).

"There was so much he should have said, but he had allowed the silence to set until it became immovable."

Abdulrazak Gurnah, a writer born in Zanzibar and now teaching writing in England, has often focused on the many issues of immigration - the difficulties of immigrants in adjusting to a new culture, the guilt sometimes felt about the family and culture left behind, and, ultimately, the confusion about what "home" means and the sometimes painful, almost physical, yearning for it. This novel, his most detailed and complex analysis of immigration and its personal effects yet, is a multigenerational novel which opens with Abbas, a sixty-three-year-old man whose origins are, at first, unknown. On his way home from work, one extremely cold day, he becomes so ill that this proud man "wishes for someone to pick him up and carry him home," and when he finally arrives at home, he collapses. When he is taken to the hospital, unable to speak, he is full of regrets for all that he has never told his family.

Hanna, the daughter of Abbas and his wife Maryam, works as a teacher, while their son Jamal is working on a doctorate tracing migration patterns from Africa and Asia into England. Both children have failed to put down roots, though they are British citizens.