The Last Gift

Abbas’s Stroke and the Family

The novel opens in Norwich — an unusual setting in British fiction, a cathedral city in East Anglia that is not London, not a large industrial city, but a provincial English town where an East African man built a life and hoped that the building would be enough. Abbas has worked there for decades, has a wife named Maryam, two children named Hanna and Jamal, a house, a routine. He is not a man who talks about the past. This is not unusual among immigrants of his generation, who came to England in the 1960s and 1970s and learned that silence was the most reliable form of adaptation.

The stroke that fells him in the novel’s early pages does not kill him — he survives it, diminished, requiring care. But it creates what his careful construction of a forward-only life had been designed to prevent: time. Hanna and Jamal are now adults. Maryam has always sensed that there are things Abbas has not told her, and the enforced intimacy of illness, the long hours of recovery, begin to dissolve the boundaries that held the secret in place. Not through dramatic revelation — Gurnah is not that kind of novelist — but through the accumulation of small disclosures, silences that carry a different weight than before, a name that appears in an old letter and cannot be accounted for.

The family is rendered with a precision that Gurnah’s more historically ambitious novels sometimes sacrifice to scope. Hanna and Jamal are genuinely distinct people: Hanna more pragmatic, more attuned to her mother’s perspective; Jamal somewhat adrift, in a relationship that may not last, uncertain of his own cultural location in a way that his parents’ certainty (however built on concealment) never prepared him for. The Norwich of the novel is specific — its streets, its social atmosphere, the particular quality of being brown in a city that is not especially multicultural and handles this with the polite discomfort characteristic of provincial England.

The Hidden First Life

What Abbas concealed is a first marriage in Zanzibar, a family begun before he came to England, a departure that was not the clean break from nothing that his English life implied. The circumstances of his leaving are themselves complicated by the political upheaval that followed Zanzibar’s 1964 revolution — which overthrew the Arab-dominated sultanate and inaugurated a period of violence and repression that caused many people to leave in ways that were not always orderly or honest. Abbas’s silence is not simply the private guilt of an individual who abandoned people he loved; it is also the silence of a generation shaped by events that they could not explain to English ears and that English people were not, in any case, particularly interested in hearing.

This is the distinctive Gurnah move: the personal secret is always embedded in historical circumstance, and the historical circumstance is always one that the host culture has declined to learn about. Abbas’s hidden first family is the individual face of a history — of Zanzibari migration to Britain, of the post-revolutionary disruptions that scattered communities across the world — that the novel renders visible by focusing on one man’s attempt to make himself legible to a new country.

For Hanna and Jamal, the revelation of the hidden life produces not betrayal exactly but a reorientation: the past they thought they knew was a construction, and they are in it differently than they believed. Gurnah handles their responses with characteristic restraint, neither dramatizing the discovery as crisis nor minimizing it as easily absorbed. The children of migrants inherit the absences in their parents’ stories, and these absences have consequences that the migrants themselves, who know what they left behind, can only partially anticipate.

Reading Gurnah’s Family Novels

The Last Gift (2011 in the UK; 2012 in the US) is often described as the most accessible entry point into Gurnah’s work, and the description is accurate enough to be useful, though it slightly undersells what accessibility means in this context. By the Sea (2001), which many critics consider his masterpiece, uses two narrators — an asylum seeker and a man he once knew in Zanzibar — whose stories intersect in ways that only gradually become clear; it is formally more demanding. Desertion (2005) moves between colonial Zanzibar and independent Zanzibar across two love stories separated by generations. Afterlives (2020), which brought him new readers after the Nobel, is his most epic in scope — a novel of German colonial East Africa and the two world wars.

The Last Gift sits at the domestic end of this range, and is the novel where Gurnah’s characteristic concerns — diaspora, silence, the secrets that migration requires, the incomplete transmissions between generations — are explored at the scale of a family rather than a history. For readers coming to Gurnah for the first time, it is the most welcoming entry point. For readers already familiar with his work, it is the novel that shows what his restraint and precision look like when applied to an intimate rather than an expansive canvas.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Gurnah’s most accessible and domestic novel, and an ideal entry point: a precise, tender account of what a Zanzibari migrant’s silence costs his English-raised children, and what love looks like when it has been built on an incomplete foundation.