Zanzibar-born British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, he said  “ I wouldn’t have picked me”, although his work does not fit the traditional mould of recent Nobel laureates. His novels were out of print in the US when his Nobel Prize was announced, who praised Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee”. Gurnah, a refugee fled Tanzania during the 1960s Zanzibar revolution, and settled and lived in England for over fifty years. His latest novel “Theft”, is a captivating story of the intertwined lives of three young people coming-of-age in postcolonial 1990s Zanzibar, East Africa. In the 1990s, growing up in Zanzibar, three very different young people – Karim, Fauzia and Badar – are coming of age, and dreaming of great possibilities in their young nation.  Karim and his mother Raya  whose life is outlined in Gurnah’s efficient story-telling in couple of pages. Raya lives on Zanzibar’s largest island, Unguja, and her romantic pursuit by a “hooligan soldier”, forces her family into arranging marriage to a 5 feet old, middle-aged divorcee. Their son Karim, is a champion clown at school when he bothers to attend. Fauzia, raised in a cloud of anxiety by her mother who fears that he falling sickness (epilepsy) that  Fauzia suffered as young child will come back. Fauzia will later marry Karim.

Fauzia repels society’s expectations by wanting become a teacher rather than a doctor. “In their world, becoming a teacher rather than a doctor was the loftiest learned ambition, more esteemed than finance or the law, both of which were thought to require some degree of crookedness” writes Gurnah.

But for Badar, an uneducated sent by his father to become a live-in servant boy in the house of a wealthy family.  Badar has never known his parents, it seems as if all doors are closed. Brought into a lowly position in a great house in Dar es Salaam, Badar finds the first true home of his life – and the friendship of Karim, the young man of the house. He begins to forget, or at least forgive, his father, the “shithead who threw him away”, and when he makes a brief visit to his old home, finds the house “darker and smaller” than before, and detects something submissive  in his mother’s manner. The answer why Badar is treated so well by Karim’s family lies in the secrets families hold. The motivations of the characters, particularly as love beings to unite and divide them. He goes to stay with Karim and Fauzia, who have now married and have their own home. Their courtship is drawn and on their third meeting he held her hand to Fauzia’s mother’s response to the romance. When Badar gets a job in a hotel, the focus narrows and pace picks up. Badar is a boy, then a man, whose life repeatedly changes through no will of his own. A refugee twice over, he bends in the breeze of his personal fortunes, but never breaks. Even when a shattering false accusation seeds Badar sent away. Karim and Fauzia refuse to turn away from their friend. A character demands of Badar, “What have you learned in your life, you useless wanker?” Badar does not reply, however later when alone, he thinks, “ I have learned to endure”.

Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Bloomsbury £18.99/ Riverhead Books $30, 256 pages.