{"product_id":"desertion-isbn-9780593633656","title":"Desertion","description":"Writing at the peak of his powers, Abdulrazak Gurnah gives us in Desertion a spellbinding novel of forbidden love and cultural upheaval, with  consequences powerfully reverberating through three generations and across continents—from the heyday of the British empire to the aftermath of African independence.Early one morning in 1899, in a small, dilapidated town along the coast of Mombassa, a Muslim man, Hassanali, sets out for a mosque but doesn’t get there. Out of the desert stumbles an Englishman who collapses at Hassanali’s feet: Martin Pearce—writer, traveler, something of an Orientalist. Hassanali cares for Pearce until the Englishman is taken to the home of colonial officer Frederick Turner to recuperate. When Pearce returns to thank his Good Samaritan, he meets and is enraptured by Rehana, Hassanali’s sister—by her gorgeous eyes and tragic aura. And so begins the passionate, illicit love affair—two lives and cultures colliding—that informs the rich, finely woven tapestry of Desertion.Gurnah, who has been short-listed for the Booker Prize, deftly and dramatically evokes the personal and political scandals of empire, the weight of tradition—of religion and culture—in everyday lives, the role of women in Muslim society, the vicissitudes of love, the complexities of filial relationships, the inexorability of miscegenation, and the power of fiction to charm and to harm. Desertion is a highly achieved, riveting work of imagination, brimming with controlled figural inventiveness, psychological acuity, and moral complexity.“An admirable achievement. . . .  A serious inquiry into the nature of love, race and empire.”  –\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e“Affecting. . . . Gurnah perfectly renders the breathless exhilaration of first love and his characters–pulled from a time and place that seem to come from firsthand experience–seem true to life.”–\u003ci\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor\u003c\/i\u003e“Gurnah writes beautifully: The brief affair between Amin and Jamila all but burns on the page.”–\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“Here is a writer at the top of his form, who commands a strong sense of narrative, a meticulous eye for family dynamics, and an understanding of the corrosive psychology of colonialism.”        –\u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e“Beautiful, elegial. . . . As seductive as the Zanzibar shore it describes.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003eAbdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948 and teaches at the University of Kent. He is the author of six novels, including Paradise, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, and By the Sea, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.1 Hassanali    THERE WAS A STORY of his first sighting. In fact, there was more than one,  but elements of the stories merged into one with time and telling. In all of  them he appeared at dawn, like a figure out of myth. In one story, he was an  upright shadow moving so slowly that in that peculiar underwater light his  approach was almost imperceptible, inching forward like destiny. In another,  he was not moving at all, not a tremor or a quiver, just looming there on  the edge of the town, grey eyes glittering, waiting for someone to appear,  for someone whose unavoidable luck it was to find him. Then, when someone  did, he slid forward towards him, to fulfil outcomes no one had predicted.  Someone else claimed to have heard him before he was seen, to have heard his  beseeching, longing howl in the darkest hour of the night, like that of an  animal out of legend. What was undisputed–although there was no real  dispute between these stories as they all added to the strangeness of his  appearance–was that it was Hassanali the shopseller who found him, or was  found by him.     There is luck in all things, as there was in this first arrival, but luck is  not the same as chance, and even the most unexpected events fulfil a design.  That is, there were consequences in the future that made it seem less than  accidental that it was Hassanali who found the man. At that time, Hassanali  was always the first person about in the morning in this locality. He was up  before dawn to open the doors and the windows of the mosque. Then he stood  on the steps to call the people to prayer, pitching his voice to all corners  of the clearing in front of him. Salla, salla. Sometimes the breeze carried  similar calls from nearby mosques, other cryers chiding the people to wake.  As-salatu khayra minannawm. Prayer is better than sleep. Hassanali probably  imagined the sinners turning over irritably at being disturbed, and probably  felt indignant and self-righteous satisfaction. When he finished calling, he  swept the dust and the grit from the mosque steps with a feathery casuarina  broom whose silent efficiency gave him deep pleasure.    This task of opening the mosque, cleaning the steps, making the call to  prayer, was one he had appointed himself to for his own reasons. Someone had  to do it, someone had to get up first, open the mosque and make the adhan  for the dawn prayers, and someone always did, for his own reasons. When that  person was ill or grew tired of the charge, there was always another person  to take over. The man who preceded him was called Sharif Mdogo, and had come  down with fever so badly in the kaskazi two years ago that he was still  bedridden. It was a little surprising that Hassanali had volunteered himself  to take over as the dawn cryer, though, not least to Hassanali himself. He  was not zealous about the mosque, and it required zeal to rise at every dawn  and bully people out of sleep. Sharif Mdogo was like that, the kind of man  who liked to barge into complacency and give it a good shake. In addition,  Hassanali was a worrying man by nature, or perhaps experience had made him  that way, had made him anxious and cautious. These semi-nocturnal chores  tortured his nerves and disturbed his nights, and he feared the darkness and  the shadows and the scuttlings of the deserted lanes. But then these were  also the reasons he offered himself for the task, as a submission and a  penance. He started doing the duty two years before the dawn of this  sighting, when his wife Malika first arrived. It was a plea that his  marriage should prosper, and a prayer for his sister's grief to end.    The mosque was only a short stroll across the clearing from his shop, but  when he started making the dawn call to prayer, he felt obliged to do as his  predecessor Sharif Mdogo had done. He entered nearby lanes, more or less  shouting into bedroom windows as he walked past, bellowing at the sleepers.  He worked out a route which avoided the chasms and caves where the worst of  the shadowy mischief lurked, but he was still prone to seeing spectral  visions hurrying away into the darkest parts of the streets as he  approached, fleeing the prayers and holy words he uttered as he exhorted the  slumbering faithful. These visions were so real–a monster claw glimpsed at  the turning of a lane, discontented spirits softly panting somewhere behind  him, images of gross underground creatures which glowed and faded before he  caught proper sight of them–that often he performed his tasks in a sweat  despite the dawn chill. One morning, during another anxious, sweat-drenched  round, when the dark lanes pressed in on him like the walls of a narrowing  tunnel, he felt a rush of air on his arm as the shadow of a dark wing caught  the corner of his eye. He ran, and after that decided to end the torment. He  retreated to the mosque steps to make his call, a short walk across the  clearing. He added the chore of sweeping the steps to make amends, even  though the imam told him that calling from the steps was all that was  required, and that Sharif Mdogo had been zealous in his duties.    Hassanali was crossing the clearing on this dawn when he saw a shadow across  the open ground begin to move towards him. He blinked and swallowed in  terror, nothing unpredictable. The world was teeming with the dead, and this  grey time was their lair. His voice croaked, his holy words dried up, his  body left him. The shadow approached him slowly, and in the fast-approaching  dawn, Hassanali thought he could see its eyes glittering with a hard, stony  light. This was a moment he had already lived in his imagination, and he  knew that as soon as he turned his back, the ghoul would devour him. If he  had been in the mosque he would have felt safe, because that is a sanctuary  which no evil can enter, but he was still a long way from there and he had  not yet opened the doors. In the end, overcome with panic, he shut his eyes,  babbled repeated pleas for God's forgiveness, and allowed his knees to give  way under him. He submitted himself to what was to come.    When he opened his eyes again, slowly, peering out as if he was lifting a  sheet under which he had been hiding from a nightmare, it was to see the  shadow slumped on the ground a few feet from him, half on its side and with  one knee bent. Now in the brightening light he could see that it was not a  spectre or a shadow or a ghoul, but an ashen-complexioned man whose grey  eyes were open in exhaustion only feet away from his. 'Subhanallah, who are  you? Are you human or spirit?' Hassanali asked, to be on the safe side. The  man sighed and groaned all at once, and so announced himself as human  without a doubt.     That was how he was when he arrived, exhausted, lost, his body worn out and  his face and arms covered with cuts and bites. Hassanali, on his knees in  the dust, felt for the man's breath, and when he felt it warm and strong on  his palm, he smiled to himself as if he had managed something clever. The  man's eyes were open, but when Hassanali waved his hand in front of them,  they did not blink. Hassanali would have preferred that they did. He rose  carefully, incredulous about the drama he was now part of, then stood for a  moment above the bundle groaning at his feet before hurrying to call for  help. By this time it was dawn. The exact moment of greatest felicity for  the dawn prayer was swiftly passing–it was only very brief–and Hassanali  had not performed the duties expected of him. He feared that the regular  early morning worshippers would be annoyed with him when they woke up later  and discovered that they had drowsed through the morning's blessing. Most of  these worshippers were elderly men who needed to keep their accounts healthy  and up-to-date in case of a sudden summons. But he should have remembered  that they also no longer slept that well, fretted the whole night long and  could not wait for the dawn and the call to prayer to release them. So even  as Hassanali set off to seek help, worrying about having failed in his duty  as the muadhin, some were stepping out of their houses to find out why there  had not been a call that morning. Perhaps some even worried if Hassanali was  well, or if something had passed him by in the night. There were witnesses,  then, to the man's first appearance, people who gathered round his wide-eyed  body and saw it slumped like a shadow in the open ground in front of the  mosque.     Hassanali returned with two young men he had found huddled half-asleep  against the café doors. They worked there and were waiting for it to open,  clinging to the last moments of rest before the day's antics began, but they  rushed to help when Hassanali shook them awake. Everyone liked to help in  the old days. When they arrived at the scene, urgent behind Hassanali's  increasingly self-important strides, it was to find three elderly men  standing a few paces from the body, watching it with fastidious interest:  Hamza, Ali Kipara and Jumaane. These were the stalwarts of the dawn prayers,  who stood directly behind the imam in the congregation, and who were the  coffee-seller's first customers every morning. They were men well past their  best years, wise men who expected their lives' endeavours to be considered  unblemished, and who kept their eyes open and on the world that passed them  by. They did not usually stir for anybody but themselves, and thought their  age allowed them to act in this way. So they were not really three elderly  men because everyone knew who they were, but by the measure of their time  and place they were old, and their infirmities were part of their dignity,  and their unbending display was perhaps an attempt at fulfilling what was  required of them. For whatever reason, they now stood there, feigning  indifference and making casual remarks while the young men and Hassanali  rushed about. Hassanali opened the mosque and the young men fetched the rope  bed, the one used for washing the dead. Hassanali winced but did not say  anything. The young men lifted the moaning body on to the rope bed and  prepared to carry it away.    All of a sudden, there was a brief tussle between Hassanali and Hamza about  where the sick man should be taken. Hamza was an imposing man despite his  age, with a lined, gnarled, greystubbled face and glaring eyes. He had been  a rich simsim merchant in years gone by, but was now simply rich. His sons  made money for him in a butchery business in Mombasa. He was sensitive about  the awe due to him, and liked to be deferred to on any matter of the  slightest importance. He liked to be treated as the informal jamadar  thereabouts. In their prime, Ali Kipara had been a basket-weaver and Jumaane  had been a housepainter, so both knew their place with the jamadar and  occupied it when called upon to do so. Hamza began to walk away, tetchy and  impatient, calling on the helpers to follow him. It was obvious that the  moral duty to the exhausted man lay with Hassanali who had found him, and  who therefore was obliged to offer care and hospitality to him. Hamza knew  this as well as anyone else, but perhaps Hamza did what he did to remind  everyone that he was a wealthy man to whom such acts of mercy were an  obligation.     In any case, everyone politely ignored Hamza, even his fellow sages, and the  man was duly carried on the rope bed to Hassanali's shop. The door to the  adjoining yard, which was also the entrance into the house, was too narrow  for the bed with the body on it, so the two young men lifted the body and  carried it into the yard, then placed it on a mat under the thatched awning  attached to the house.    The three elderly worshippers squeezed into the yard as well, casting swift  glances around. There was not very much to see but none of them had been  inside Hassanali's yard before and could not suspend curiosity even at this  dramatic time. It was a large yard, running the full length of the house.  There were plants in pots, two curtained windows facing out of the house,  one either side of the inner door, a paved platform for washing clothes, a  cluster of seredani for cooking and at one end of the yard the washroom and  the room for necessities–an ordinary yard. They might have noted the  recently whitewashed walls and the lushness of the pot-plants, among them a  red rose, a lavender in bloom and a bristling aloe.    The crowd of six stood unspeaking around the body for a minute, as if  surprised about the way everything had turned out. Then, after a moment,  there were several opinions about what should be done next, spoken one after  another, like pledges to an obligation. We should call Mamake Zaituni the  healer. And someone should fetch the Legbreaker. I believe someone should go  and tell the imam at once, in case he needs to say special prayers against  contagion or worse. That was Hamza, as always going for the grand gesture.  Hassanali nodded unprotestingly to the suggestions and ushered the small  crowd out. They went reluctantly but they had no choice. It was only the  drama of the groaning man that permitted their presence in the privacy of  his home in the first place, so Hassanali only had to spread his arms and  wave them gently for everyone to turn towards the yard door.    'Thank you, thank you all. Will you please ask Mamake Zaituni to come?' he  asked, putting himself even further in his neighbours' debt.    'Without a doubt,' Hamza the merchant said in his self-important voice,  waving his stick at one of the young men. 'Go, go, you, there is someone's  life here.'     There were parting suggestions. Don't touch him until Mamake Zaituni comes.  I won't touch him. Don't move him until the Legbreaker arrives. I won't move  him. If you need any help . . . I'll call. Hassanali shut the yard door  without bolting it–he did not want to seem too inhospitable–and returned  to the traveller on the mat under the awning. He was suddenly wary, anxious  about being alone with the man, as if he had allowed himself too near a wild  beast. Who could he be? What kind of man went wandering alone in the  wilderness? He remembered now he had said that to the man as he lay on the  ground: Who are you? The noise of their arrival was sure to have woken up  his wife and his sister, who were probably already standing behind the  window curtains, waiting to come out and see what was going on. All of a  sudden he was afraid that he had done something stupid in bringing the sick  stranger home. The thought set off a shiver of anxiety across his sternum.    He looked on the man with a marvelling smile. What was a stranger, wounded  in the wilderness, doing on the mat in their yard? It might as well have  been a flying horse or a talking dove. Such things did not happen to them.  He remembered his terror when he had first seen his shadow and taken it for  a hideous ghoul. Many things frightened him, a grown man. Sometimes his life  loomed so large on him that he saw shadows everywhere. It could have been an  ugly malicious anything at that uncertain time between light and dark,  between the real and the undead world, but perhaps he should not have thrown  himself on the ground in the way that he did. If it had been a spectre it  would have smiled before pulverising his soul. Hassanali's smile was as much  for his soft-fleshed timid self as it was for the man at his feet. For this  was no spectre, and no more ugly than the next person. His face was drained  and covered with straggly, untrimmed, greying hair. His eyes were still  open, bleary and unseeing, although even as he looked he thought he saw them  blink. His breathing was shallow, softly panting, and behind it was a hardly  audible groan. His arms were scratched and pierced by thorns. The calico  smock he wore over trousers and sandals was grey with dust and use. It was  torn and mended, streaked and stained, acquired in his wanderings perhaps  rather than brought from wherever he started out from. No one would start a  journey with such rags. The sandals were tied with strips of cloth, and  around his middle, worn like a belt, were the remains of a brown shirt.  Another strip of the same material made a headband across his brow.  Hassanali smiled at the melodrama of his costume, exactly like that of an  adventurer lost in a desert, or like a fighter. The thought made his stomach  lighten. Had he brought a bandit to their house, a marauder who would kill  them all? But no, the man was half-dead, perhaps himself a victim of  bandits.","brand":"Random House Large Print","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302177362149,"sku":"NP9780593633656","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593633656_09a086e5-6065-40c0-9195-afa3eeb98218.jpg?v=1742926492","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/desertion-isbn-9780593633656","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}