The Washington Post’s 10 Best Books of the Year:

‘Afterlives’
By Abdulrazak Gurnah, Riverhead

“Afterlives,” by the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in literature, is set in East Africa in the early 20th century. It demonstrates how gracefully Gurnah works in two registers simultaneously. The story is at once a globe-spanning epic of European colonialism and an intimate look at village life in one of the many overlooked corners of Earth. Deftly inverting the old Western narrative, it renders the Europeans as background characters and places East Africans in the forefront, moving fluidly between the complicated lives of its characters and the reckless actions of old empires.