Blurring the Boundaries Between Good and Evil

The narrative explores the lives of three characters, whose dreams are crushed by circumstances and colonialism

- By RAHUL SINGH

If there's one novelist who quietly leaves his readers unsettled, book after book, it is Abdulrazak Gurnah.

With Theft—his first novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize—Gurnah offers a story that is at once intimate and expansive, a tale of love, survival, and the slow bruises of history.

The novel opens bluntly: “Raya’s marriage happened in a panic.” This incident sets everything in motion. Raya, a young Tanzanian girl, manages to escape a turbulent marriage with her child, Karim, who grows up to be a promising young man. Unlike other men around him, Karim loves to read, learn about the world, and aspires to go beyond the narrow confines of drudgery that he witnesses. Around him orbit two others: Badar, an orphaned child employed at Raya’s house as a servant, who is reminded of burdensome existence now and then. Then there is Fauzia, ambitious and bright, torn between her dream of becoming a teacher and her uncontrollable desire for Karim.