Afterlives

A worthy but ultimately quite unmemorable work. Life in Africa in the early 20th century has never been a topic of specific interest to me. Gurnah does well to evoke an atmosphere, even if it was difficult fully to invest in the settings he sought to convey. Afterlives is really two separate stories that only tenuously overlap towards the very end to create that slight sense of ‘feel-good’ that is a sure way to sell novels, if nothing else. What perhaps piqued my interest most in this work was to learn about Germany's attempts at empire building in Africa, which unravelled at the time of World War One. To find oneself first under de facto German rule, then British, then independent in the space of a generation must have had a significant impact on citizens' Weltanschauung. Six out of ten.

By Abdulrazak Gurnah