Listen free for 30 days
Listen with offer
-
The Last Gift
- Narrated by: Ali Zayn
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.00 for first 30 days
The Last Gift
Buy Now for £14.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
Summary
Bloomsbury presents The Last Gift by Abdulrazak Gurnah, read by Ali Zayn.
From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, an astounding meditation on family, self and the meaning of home.
Abbas has never told anyone about his past—before he was a sailor on the high seas, before he met his wife Maryam outside a drugstore in Exeter, before they settled into a quiet life with their children, Jamal and Hanna. Now, at the age of sixty-three, he suffers a collapse that renders him unable to speak about things he thought he would one day have to.
Jamal and Hanna have grown up and gone out into the world. They were both born in England but cannot shake a sense of apartness. Hanna calls herself Anna now, and has just moved to a new city to be near her boyfriend. She feels the relationship is headed somewhere serious, but the words have not yet been spoken out loud. Jamal, the listener of the family, moves into a student house and is captivated by a young woman with dark blue eyes and her own complex story to tell. Abbas's illness forces both children home, to the dark silences of their father and the fretful capability of their mother, Maryam, who has never thought to find herself—until now.
Critic reviews
"Abdulrazak Gurnah is a captivating storyteller, with a voice both lyrical and mordant, and an oeuvre haunted by memory and loss." (The Guardian)
"Gurnah has some of the sharpness and clarity of VS Naipaul and more than a dash of Ben Okri's measured poetic diction." (New Statesman)
"As always with Gurnah's writing, you relish his juxtapositions of beauty and bitterness, political edge and personal pain, betrayal and resilience." (Michele Roberts, author of Ignorance)