Abdulrazak Gurnah
Abdulrazak Gurnah (born 20 December 1948) is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include ...
. It was first published in the United States by
The New Press
The New Press is an independent non-profit public-interest book publisher established in 1992 by André Schiffrin and in the United Kingdom by
Bloomsbury Publishing
Bloomsbury Publishing plc is a British worldwide publishing house of fiction and non-fiction. It is a constituent of the FTSE SmallCap Index. Bloomsbury's head office is located in Bloomsbury, an area of the London Borough of Camden. It has a U ...
in May 2001. It is Gurnah's sixth novel. ''By the Sea'' was longlisted for the
Booker Prize
The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a Literary award, literary prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United King ...
and shortlisted for the ''Los Angeles Times'' Book Prize.
''By the Sea'' is narrated, in part, by a man named Saleh Omar, who is attempting to enter the United Kingdom on a fake passport. Omar also goes by the pseudonym "Rajab Shaaban Mahmud", an identity he stole to use on his fake passport. The novel is also narrated, in part, by Latif Mahmud, the son of the real Rajab Shaaban Mahmud—a man who turns out to be a scoundrel. Latif Mahmud also travels to Europe, but by a more legitimate route—obtaining a student visa to East Germany and travelling by a circuitous route from there to the UK.
Michael Pye, in a review for ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', notes the novel's self-conscious echoes of
Herman Melville
Herman Melville (Name change, born Melvill; August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American people, American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance (literature), American Renaissance period. Among his bes ...
's short story " Bartleby, the Scrivener". Saleh Omar, the protagonist, quotes Bartleby's mantra "I would prefer not to"; Pye argues that " invoking Melville, Gurnah opens a little inquest into the nature of pity itself."
Critic Sissy Helff argues that ''By the Sea'' "is a fine example of a confrontation of readers with a highly complex picture of the predicament of refugees in the wake of movement and migration".