Theft

Two Tanzanian men, abandoned as boys, forge their own paths in this incisive novel by Nobel Prize winner Gurnah (Afterlives). Karim’s Muslim parents divorce when he is a boy. His mother, Raya, feels no affection for him, and abandons him to her father after falling in love with a man named Haji Othman. Years later, Badar, a 10-year-old orphan boy, enters the Othman household as a domestic servant for Raya, who’s now married to Haji. As the novel unfolds, Badar is revealed to be Haji’s nephew, cast off by his wayward brother and hated by Baba, the household’s elderly and devout patriarch. Karim becomes aware of Badar’s plight during a visit home from university, when Badar is 15. Two years later, when Baba suspects Badar of stealing groceries on the family’s credit, he instructs Haji to banish the teenager. Badar goes to live with Karim, now a married low-level bureaucrat in Zanzibar, and both men rise through the ranks of their respective fields, with Badar’s hotel busboy job leading to an assistant manager position and Karim on track to become a government minister. By the novel’s end, their series of cosmopolitan encounters have driven one to abandon his Tanzanian identity and the other to reinvest in it. Written in lucid prose, Gurnah’s tale is at once culturally specific and emotionally universal, especially in depicting Badar’s heartache as a boy and the strangeness of his arrangement with the Othman household as seen from Karim’s point of view. Gurnah is at the top of his game. Agent: Peter Strauss, RCW Literary. (Mar.)