Many layered, violent, beautiful and strange ... a poetic and vividly conjured book about Africa and the brooding power of the unknown

Independent on Sunday

A jewel-like meditation on exile

Polly Morland, Guardian, Books of the Year

An aural archive of a lost Africa ... Tangling travel adventures, social documentary, political indictment and a doomed love story ... Paradise is alive with the unexpected. In it, an obliterated world is enthrallingly retrieved

Sunday Times

Gurnah evokes his world in poetic prose which is pure and lucid - a small paradise in itself ... The pleasures, sadnesses and losses in all the shining facets of this book are lingering and exquisite

Guardian

Paradise is that rare thing, a novel that is totally convincing in the vivid physical world it presents, yet transcending that world and reaching into the universal. Folk tale, travel story, drama of love and loss, by turns touching and horrifying, it is a novel to be grateful for

Barry Unsworth

A gently meandering coming-of-age tale

Michaela Wong, Spectator, Books of the Year