By the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature'A careful and heartfelt exploration of the way memory inevitably consoles and disappoints us' Sunday Times 'Beautifully written and pleasurable ... The work of a maestro' Guardian'An absorbing novel about abandonment and loss' Daily Telegraph___________________________________Early one morning in 1899, in a small town along the coast from Mombasa, Hassanali sets out for the mosque. But he never gets there, for out of the desert stumbles an ash ...