Admiring Silence

Hamish Hamilton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996 8vo., blue boards, spine lettered in silver; in the unclipped dustwrapper (£16.00) with a design by Debbie Lush; pp. [viii], 3-216, [ii]; very mild bruising at spine tips and faint spotting to the upper edge; else fine in fine wrapper with just a touch of corresponding pushing to the head and foot. First edition, with full number line 1-10. The fifth novel by this Nobel Prize-winning writer, with a story following one man's escape from Zanzibar to the UK, and his return many years to his native country. There, he finds a land greatly changed in the years he has been away: "as I wandered over the rubble of the damaged town I felt like a refugee from my life. The transformations of things I had known and places which I had lived with differently in my mind for years seemed like an expulsion from my past", he writes. The plot is in many ways semi-autobiographical, with the author himself leaving the island in which he was born as a refugee in 1968 after the overthrow of the ruling Arab elite in the Zanzibar Revolution. A story of cultural identity, love, and family relationships, Admiring Silence is a moving and oftentimes humorous account of one man's place in the world, told directly through the author's own experiences: "After all these years I can't get over the feeling of being alien in England, of being a foreigner. Sometimes I think that what I feel for England is disappointed love" (Blurb). . Fine. Hardcover. 1st Edition. 1st Printing. 1996.