Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025, 246 pages

This is the story of three young Tanzanians: Karim, Fauzia and Badar, and their relationship with each other.

Karim’s mother Raya lives in Zanzibar and is forced into marrying a much older man by her parents. When she walks out of her marriage, she leaves Karim with her parents. She “treated him like a possession she was fond of but the details of whose welfare she was happy to leave to her parents”. She eventually remarries and moves to Dar es Salaam. When his grandmother dies, Karim is taken in by his older half-brother Ali. When Karim gets into college in Dar, his mother invites him to stay with her and her husband Haji. The mother and son finally become close.

Badar lives with his stepfather and stepmother in a village. When he is 14, his stepfather pulls him out of school and takes him to Dar es Salaam to work in Haji’s home. His stepfather resents having to take care of him, and there seems to be some connection between him and Haji, but Badar is kept in the dark about it. Raya and Haji treat Badar almost as a son.

Fauzia is a bright young woman, who had epileptic fits as a child. Although they seem to have disappeared, the threat of them recurring hangs over her, which makes her mother chronically anxious. Fauzia and her father have to deal with constantly reassuring the mother.

The young people form a threesome. Badar meets Karim when he visits his mother’s home. The boy hero worships the young man, and Karim encourages Badar to continue his studies in his spare time. Karim meets Fauzia in university, and the two fall in love and marry, and move to Zanzibar. He gets a job working on a sustainable development project funded by the European Union.

When Haji’s father, known as Uncle Othman—who, for some reason, cannot stand Badar—accuses the boy of stealing and insists that he leave the house, Karim and Fauzia take him in, much in the same way as Ali took Karim in. Badar gets a job at the front desk of the Tamarind Hotel, a boutique hotel converted from a mansion once owned by an Omani family.

Fauzia becomes pregnant, and Karim is delighted. He had sworn that he would never be like his parents and abandon his child; he will make sure that the child knows it is wanted. But everything changes when the baby arrives. Used to being the centre of attention, Karim is now relegated to the sidelines. The child cries all the time, making it hard for him to focus on anything. He starts to lose his temper, and the fact that Fauzia is always exhausted, unable to give him the kind of attention he wants does not help. Badar by now has moved to a place of his own. And oddly enough, when he visits, the child goes straight to him. He is able to calm her down, something her father is unable to do.

When a foreign aid worker, Geraldine, arrives at the Tamarind Hotel, things start to get complicated. It is clear that she is looking for a fling, and although Badar finds her attractive, he does not respond to her overtures. But Karim, who meets her when he visits Badar, does. Geraldine becomes a catalyst in the lives of Karim, Fauzia and Badar.

The story moves between the three protagonists. Abdulrazak Gurnah weaves the recent history of the country into the story, especially the Zanzibar revolution of January 1964, which led to the overthrow of the Sultan of Zanzibar and his Arab government. The island became the People’s Republic of Zanzibar but in April of the same year, united with Tanganyika to form Tanzania.

The stories Raya’s father used to tell her when she was a child dried up after the revolution. He had become bitter, and “a recitation of injustices and grievances replaced the stories that had charmed her childhood”. Uncle Othman too, has been affected by the revolution. He is grieving, something that Badar senses: “He was drawn to sadness and could not help noticing it in people”.

This is a story of theft in many ways—not just the theft that Badar has been accused of but also a theft of childhoods and of love, of people withholding love from those close to them. The title can be seen in a wider context: for example, Geraldine, the British aid worker who was there to digitize health records, was really there to live out her fantasies without caring about the damage she caused.

This is also a story of absent parents. Badar does not know his biological parents, and Karim does not know his father—just that he did something that made Raya flee him. And Raya herself keeps a distance from her son until he is much older. Will Karim be able to keep his promise to his child?

I found the ending a bit too neat but Gurnah writes perceptively about people and the way they behave. This is a book that draws the reader into the lives of its protagonists.