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‘A brilliant and important book’
– New Statesman, Books of the Year

‘Riveting and heartbreaking’
– Maaza Mengiste, Guardian

“Rarely in a lifetime can you open a book and find that reading it encapsulates the enchanting qualities of a love affair … One scarcely dares breathe while reading it for fear of breaking the enchantment’
– The Times

While he was still a little boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the German colonial troops. After years away, he returns to his
village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away.

Another young man returns to the town he once lived in. Hamza was not stolen for the war, but fled into it to escape a life of bondage. In the war he has grown up at the right hand of an officer whose protection has marked him for life. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he seeks
only work and security – and the love of the beautiful Afiya.

As fate knots these young people together, as they live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war on another continent lengthens
and darkens, ready to snatch them up and carry them away…

“A lost Africa, alive with the unexpected. In it, an obliterated world is enthrallingly retrieved’
– Sunday Times

‘From the first assured pages of Afterlives, a book of quiet beauty and tragedy, it is clear one is in the hands of a master storyteller’
– Financial Times

‘As beautifully written and pleasurable as anything I’ve read… The work of a maestro’
– Guardian