By the Sea

A masterwork by the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, in which two immigrants’ conflicting stories about their common homeland reveal the buried truths that drove them from it

On a late November afternoon, Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport from his native Zanzibar. With him he has a small bag in which lies his most precious possession—a mahogany box containing incense. He used to own a furniture shop, have a house and be a husband and father. Now he is an asylum seeker from paradise...