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“I’m not a failure,” I shouted at the closed door. “I’m a tragedy. This deadpan world is full of chaos and I’m one of the lost.”

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

I am reminded of Zora Neale Hurston’s quote every time I think of Abdulrazak Gurnah. His fiction was not commercially successful; no one knew him, the author of ten novels, when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. Then, unsurprisingly, publishers were desperate to have them in their list; his novels were frantically reissued, so great suddenly was their demand. And each time I read Gurnah, I’m convinced it is his best – a judgment that passes on to the next book. So much is remarkable about Gurnah; foremost among them are perseverance and blind devotion to one’s work.

Admiring Silence, Gurnah’s fifth novel, published in 1996, is, in his own words, a novel about the process of displacement, the process of losing a home, and also coming to learn to live in another home. All this, along with material and emotional adjustments, may be achieved through “the temptation to clean up your history” – to tell your story in such a way that you are accepted, and...

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