Theft, 2025, Abdulrazak Gurnah *****

I have always loved Gurnah's novels, the subtlety and compassion with which he narrates complicated human lives, the way he manages to be poetic and utterly engaging at once. When he won the Nobel Prize in 2021, I was ecstatic. He wasn't as widely known as he deserved to be, and his body of work has earned a much wider readership. If you're new to Gurnah, I've reviewed two of his other novels here that I wholeheartedly recommend: Admiring Silence and By the Sea. 

Theft is, on the surface, several stories woven into one. There's Raya, married off by her father as a teenager to save the family's honour. There's her son Karim, ambitious, sharp, fast-forward-thinking, the undeniable star of the book. There's Fauzia, intelligent and guarded, who finally believes she's found the man of her dreams and that it's safe to set her fears aside. And there's Badar, who was supposed to be nothing more than Raya's servant. Their lives tangle together against the backdrop of post-colonial Tanzania during its tourist boom, a boom that, tellingly, does nothing to untangle any of their troubles. 

What Gurnah does so well here is take his time. He doesn't rush a single thread. He lets himself sit with postpartum depression and what it does to a young couple already trying to navigate a newborn's arrival. He sits with child marriage, with second chances, with the quiet, unglamorous fate of domestic workers, and with a dozen other threads of ordinary human difficulty besides. And somehow, in just 240 pages, he gives every single character their own vantage point. You get the same events refracted through different eyes, which is a small, quiet marvel of a structural choice, and it never once feels crowded. Gurnah seems to know his characters from the inside, including, remarkably, the women.

Theft is a novel I thoroughly enjoyed and recommend without reservation. Sometimes that's really all there is to say