Category Sarah Perry

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Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah audiobook review – coming-of-age saga in Tanzania

Three young people step boldly into their adult lives in this elegantly narrated novel from the Nobel laureate

The Nobel prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah is known for his portrayals of east Africans and the after-effects of colonial rule. Opening in Zanzibar in the aftermath of independence, his 11th novel, Theft, spans half a century as it documents the lives of Karim, Fauzia and Badar. We learn how young Karim is treated as “an afterthought” by his mother, Raya, who divorces her much older husband and leaves her son behind to start a new life.

Mother and son are reunited several years later in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where Raya has married a pharmacist named Haji. Karim, who grows up to be handsome, intelligent and more than a little conceited, gets a scholarship to study in the city and meets Fauzia, who is training to be a teacher and is keen to avoid the fate of other “mute daughter[s] laid out for deflowering”. She and Karim marry, and the pair open their home to Badar, a former servant of Raya and Haji’s who was abandoned by his parents as a child.

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‘I wanted to write more than I wanted to have children’: author Sarah Perry on rejecting motherhood

When the novelist was faced with the decision of whether to pursue fertility treatment or focus on her career, her literary ambitions kicked in

Fifteen years ago, having said all my life that I never wanted a baby, that I couldn’t fathom why any free woman would do such a thing to her body and her mind, I suddenly and passionately wanted a child. I remember where I was when this feeling, so heretical to me, arrived: it was early morning in London, and having come down Fleet Street on my way to work, I was standing at the till of a newsagents to pay for a Diet Coke, a flapjack and a pack of Silk Cut. There were no children there and no pregnant women; nothing had been said or done to change my mind. It had simply landed on me, and more or less immediately – because I’ve never known how to control an impulse, and because I was 30, which seemed to me then a great age – my husband, Robert, and I set about trying to have a child.

When for some months nothing happened, I turned to the websites where women who’ve never met scrutinise their bodies for signs of pregnancy or fertility or miscarriage, and my vocabulary changed. I became able to communicate in acronyms impenetrable to anyone who hadn’t held a dozen ovulation sticks in a dozen urine streams, and it is all so long ago now that I only remember one: 2WW. At first I took this to be some dry reference to the second world war, since they did seem to be always in battle, these women, or in flight – but in fact it refers to the “two-week wait”, the fearful, hopeful days between sex and ovulation, and the first signs the uterus had succeeded or failed (that these signs can be identical sometimes invokes a kind of madness, to which I also briefly succumbed).

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Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry review – a brilliant meditation on mortality

The Essex Serpent author offers a moving account of her father-in-law’s final illness that will resonate widely

The novelist Sarah Perry’s father-in-law, David, died of oesophageal cancer in 2022. This book tells the story of his dying, from the last time she saw him well, on a trip to Great Yarmouth at the end of summer, to his death less than two months later, just nine days after being diagnosed.

It’s not easy to account for what makes this book so special. Its main character is as unpromisingly ordinary as its title suggests, and some may even find him a little boring. David Perry is the kind of man who spends hours sorting his beloved stamp collection into albums with the aid of long-tipped forceps and magnifying glasses, or filling in his Sudoku puzzle books, or reading the latest copy of the Antiques Gazette, looking intently at porcelain dogs and chased silver punch-bowls.

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