It wasn’t until 2021, when Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature, that his novels garnered attention in the United States. When Gurnah’s first post-Nobel book came out in 2025, I snapped it up. I especially recommend it for travelers heading to Zanzibar, the birthplace of Gurnah and where much of the action in the book takes place.

Gurnah, who is partially of Yemeni ancestry, fled to England three years after the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution, when Black Africans wrested control of the archipelago from its Arab elite. (During the 18th and 19th centuries, Zanzibar was a major slave-trading center, sending enslaved Africans to plantations throughout the Omani Empire, until the British government intervened.)

Gurnah’s prose is written in a spare, formal style that polarizes reviewers. Some (The Wall Street Journal) appreciated the “characteristically simple phrase[s] suggesting vast emotions.” Others (The New York Times) said that the writing was sometimes “anachronistic and awkward.” I found the bracing clarity of the unadorned style to be thoroughly engaging. It laid the characters bare.

And the characters are many. Theft is something of a triple (or even quadruple) bildungsroman. We see Tanzania of the 1980s through the 2000s through the first-person perspectives of several characters whose lives overlap. Each could be a worthy protagonist, though one or two become harder to root for as the plot develops.

I especially enjoyed the sections of the novel set in a boutique hotel in Zanzibar’s historic Stone Town. Foreign aid workers are some of the guests, and at least one well-intentioned volunteer does more harm than good. 

The Tanzanian setting and ever-shifting perspectives are unconventional for the average American reader, but I suspect that if you pick up this novel, you’ll find it enjoyable, moving and illuminating.