Author's name: Abdul Razzaq Gurnah

The novel revolves around a twelve-year-old boy, whose father sells Yusuf, the hero of a twentieth-century epic, to pay off a debt. From the simple life of rural Africa, Yusuf is thrown into the complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa – a fascinating world where Black African Muslims, Christian missionaries, and Indians from the subcontinent coexist in a fragile and delicate social hierarchy.

Through the eyes of Youssef, Gurnah depicts societies at war, commercial safaris gone awry, and the global experiences of adolescence. Then, just as Youssef begins to understand the choices required of him, he and everyone around him must adapt to the new reality of European colonialism. The result is a page-turning epic that covers the same territory as the novels of Isak Dinesen and William Boyd, but does so from a perspective previously unavailable in this rarefied part of the world.

The novel follows the story of Yusuf, a boy born in the fictional town of Kawa, Tanzania, at the turn of the 20th century. Yusuf's father, a hotel owner, is indebted to a wealthy and powerful Arab merchant named Aziz. Early in the story, Yusuf is mortgaged for his father's debts to Aziz and must work as an unpaid servant for the merchant. Yusuf then joins Aziz in a caravan as they travel to parts of Central Africa and the Congo Basin that have not been traded for generations. Here, Aziz's merchant caravan encounters the hostility of local tribes, wild animals, and difficult terrain. As the caravan returns to East Africa, World War I begins. The German army begins its sweep through Tanzania, forcibly conscripting African men as soldiers.