Dottie

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What to expect

By the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021

A searing tale of a young woman discovering her troubled family history and cultural past

‘Gurnah writes with wonderful insight about family relationships and he folds in the layers of history with elegance and warmth’ The Times

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Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour finds solace amidst the squalor of her childhood by spinning warm tales of affection about her beautiful names. But she knows nothing of their origins, and little of her family history – or the abuse her ancestors suffered as they made their home in Britain.

At seventeen, she takes on the burden of responsibility for her brother and sister and is obsessed with keeping the family together. However, as Sophie, lumpen yet voluptuous, drifts away, and the confused Hudson is absorbed into the world of crime, Dottie is forced to consider her own needs. Building on her fragmented, tantalising memories, she begins to clear a path through life, gradually gathering the confidence to take risks, to forge friendships and to challenge the labels that have been forced upon her.

Critics Review

  • Gurnah is a master storyteller

    Financial Times

  • [A] captivating storyteller, with a voice both lyrical and mordant, and an oeuvre haunted by memory and loss. His intricate novels of arrival and departure … reveal, with flashes of acerbic humour, the lingering ties that bind continents, and how competing versions of history collide

    Guardian

  • Gurnah writes with wonderful insight about family relationships and he folds in the layers of history with elegance and warmth

    The Times

  • Exile has given Gurnah a perspective on the “balance between things” that is astonishing, superb

    Observer

  • Gurnah etches with biting incisiveness the experiences of immigrants exposed to contempt, hostility or patronising indifference on their arrival in Britain

    Spectator

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