Abdulrazak Gurnah has achieved great renown – he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 – by fixing his sights on the most humble and unsung human activities. His characters tend to work in hospital canteens or lowly clerical positions or keep shop in modest neighbourhoods of his native Zanzibar. Gurnah’s fiction is filled with descriptions, written in often mesmerically plain prose, of scrubbing dishes, sweeping floors and preparing meals; his sympathy has always been with those who keep life ticking over and don’t expect any particular gratitude for the trouble. 

Badar, the central character in Theft, the author’s eleventh novel, has been dealt an inauspicious hand but isn’t one to sulk. At the age of six, he was told by his adoptive mother ‘to bear life’s burden without grumbling. That was what everyone had to do.’ At thirteen, he is dispatched to a relatively affluent household in Dar es Salaam to work as a domestic servant. Although the mistress of the house, Raya, and her cheerful pharmacist husband, Haji, treat Badar well enough, he is regarded with unconcealed contempt by Haji’s pious elderly father. His quiet watchfulness also arouses the suspicions of Karim, Raya’s son from a previous marriage. Is Badar ‘simply naive and self-effacing’, Karim asks, or ‘an eavesdropper, a future mischief-maker’?

Gurnah mines this uncertainty for suspense. Until the very end of the novel, we’re kept in some doubt about Badar’s true capacities. Although outwardly he tends towards ‘mute servitude and deference’, we know that he experiences agonising stirrings towards the women around him and wonder how long he can contain