u003cbu003eu003cbu003eA NATIONAL BESTSELLERu003cbru003eu003cbru003e“Superb. . . . A celebration of a place and time when people held onto their own ways, and basked in ordinary joys even as outside forces conspired to take them away.u003cbu003e” u003ciu003e—u003c/iu003eu003c/bu003eu003c/bu003eu003ciu003eNew York Timesu003c/iu003eu003cbru003eu003cbru003eFrom the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a sweeping, multi-generational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the brutal colonization of east Africa.u003c/bu003eu003cbru003eu003cbru003e When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his backu003cbu003e–u003c/bu003euntil he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.
