New Gurnah novel and backlist to Bloomsbury

Gravel Heart, the new novel by Man Booker shortlisted author Abdulrazak Gurnah, is to be published by Bloomsbury along with Gurnah's currently unavailable work.

Group editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle and executive editor Anton Mueller acquired world English rights from David Miller at Rogers, Coleridge & White. Foreign rights are being handled by Laurence Laluyaux, Stephen Edwards and Zoë Nelson, who recently placed all Gurnah’s previous novels with the Turkish publisher Illetisim Yayinlari.

Gravel Heart "scans aspects of life – emotional, political, sexual, familial – with the pulse as a thriller, from revolutionary east Africa in the 1960s to the restless London of the 1990s – seen by a boy exiled from his home and his later self, adrift where he finds himself addressing what he thought had happened may not be the case".  

Gurnah is a professor of English at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and one of the 2016 Man Booker Prize judges. His fourth novel Paradise (Bloomsbury) was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 1994 and the Whitbread Prize.

Miller said: "I remember sitting as Deborah Rogers’ secretary and opening the envelope with the folder with something called Paradise, beginning reading, being enraptured. Over two decades later, it has been a joy to read Abdulrazak and watch his best book yet unfold, a book that made me smile and which I finished with no dry eye, and to find all of his books the home he has had since Alexandra arrived at Bloomsbury."

Memory Of Departure, Pilgrim's Way, Dottie and Admiring Silence will be made available digitally and Gravel Heart will be published in May 2017. This will be the first time his whole backlist will have been available from the same publishing house.