A boy is born into an unhappy home, the product of an arranged marriage between a vivacious young woman and a much older man of local importance, “relentless in his demand for her body.” Disgusted and miserable, Raya finally returns to her parents, taking her son, Karim, with her—but then, seeking the excitement of a different life, leaves him to his grandparents’ care and heads for the bright lights of Dar es Salaam.

Another boy, Badar, is born in a distant village. When Badar is 13, his father unceremoniously announces that because he has no money, he’s pulling his son from school and sending him to the city to work as a servant. So it is that Badar, full of promise and yearning, winds up working in the home of Raya and her new husband, Raji, to whom Badar is somehow related—a matter, like so many elements in Adbulrazak Gurnah’s new novel, Theft (Riverhead, March 18), that unfolds through subtly revealed details.

Speaking with Kirkus by Zoom from his temporary residence in Abu Dhabi, where he’s teaching a course for New York University called “Migrant Poetics,” Gurnah offers one such detail. Asked how his novel came about, he hearkens back to his youth in Zanzibar, then a sultanate under more or less benignly indifferent British administration, now part of the United Republic of Tanzania. The movement for independence was growing in his school years, but it was a more personal moment that set the new book in motion.

“With novels there is always a little impulse somewhere that starts things off,” says Gurnah, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2021, “but it isn’t always the one you might expect. I remembered an incident concerning a young person, a teenager like myself, who used to work for a family, probably running errands for the family, doing jobs like that. He was pretty raggedly dressed. Those servants are usually quite young people, almost children.

“There was something unjust in this. You could see it. We were going to school, and you’d see these young people who, because their parents needed the money, did this sort of work instead of studying with us. I remember one of these young people, almost the same age as I. He was accused of having stolen sugar, I think it was, and was thrown out of the house and shamed.

“These things came back to me 40 or 50 years later, and I was thinking about the injustice of it. I tried to think of a way of doing something that would investigate and explore that. How would it come about? How would the person feel? That’s how I began this story.”

Just so, Badar is accused of stealing groceries from his employers and almost ejected from the household until he proves his innocence—not without difficulty. It is but one of many thefts that give the novel its title. Another is the wrenching end of Badar’s childhood, as he is torn from family and school and put to work with no say in the matter. Karim’s childhood, too, has been stolen from him, though eventually, as a teenager, he is invited into his mother’s home and slowly integrates with his new family. Therein lie complications.

“Thinking about that incident in my teenage years, about the injustice, was one thing,” Gurnah continues. “But then other things came up, and the story began to grow beyond the time of [the country’s] independence.”

That great political change finds both Badar and Karim poised for very different lives, hinted at in the novel’s epigraph from Joseph Conrad: “In general it’s very difficult for one to become remarkable.” Karim blossoms into a handsome young man, gifted in his studies, glib, popular—and well aware of the effect he has on people. One is his future wife, Fauzia, who notices his swagger. Whether it’s a front to mask his lack of self-confidence or a sign of an arrogance that can only grow, Fauzia, as Gurnah says, “first assesses him as somebody who’s walking through the streets expecting to be hailed by people who would praise him. In a way that’s not surprising, since in a small place you’re self-conscious of having done things to stand out. It’s not necessarily bad, but some people outgrow that and understand that a little modesty and humility go a long way. And some people don’t.”

Badar, in turn, is nothing but humble, though he harbors a steady loathing for the father who cast him away: “[Badar] could not remember when he started to think of him as a shithead,” writes Gurnah. For all his hard-earned hatred, Badar keeps his feelings deep inside. Well aware of his precarious situation as just another poor country kid in the big city—and often reminded of it—he becomes a servant of a different sort, a sub-sub-clerk in a modest hotel, just as the emerging nation of Tanzania has begun to attract both tourists and international aid workers.

“This was a very interesting time,” says Gurnah. “The 1980s and the early 1990s in Zanzibar and in Tanzania were very static periods. Nothing much was happening. But then the economy started to open up and foreigners began to arrive. This made many things possible, because now the autocracy could not operate in secret. It also opened up possibilities for people like Karim to begin to move on, to become part of this corrupt organization, the government.”

So it is that Karim, with the backing of the right people, finds a way to “become remarkable.” More thefts ensue, of money but also of happiness, ambition, honor. Yet there’s also the promise of a better future for Badar, who, having kept his shoulder to the wheel and his eyes downcast, finds a little corner of the world to call his own and someone to share it with—for, as Gurnah says, smiling, “What’s a novel without a love story?”

Gurnah, who lives in England, has been traveling a good deal of late, visiting China, India, and South America, returning to Tanzania, and now working at his half-semester appointment in Abu Dhabi. He’ll return to England for the publication of Theft, and after promoting it—“television, festivals, and all that”—he plans to take the summer and fall to begin a new novel. Just what it will be, he’s not yet sure. When offered the suggestion that Theft is open-ended enough to admit a sequel, Gurnah laughs and says, “I don’t think so. But you never can tell. I wrote Paradise, and then 20 years later I wrote Afterlives, which takes up the story in another way. But I don’t think I have enough time for another 20 years’ pause before I do that again.”

Meanwhile, there are books to read. Gurnah cites Percival Everett, whose recent novel James he praises. He also points out the Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga’s The Barefoot Woman. “There’s just an enormous amount of good work out there,” he says. “There are so many stories to tell. It’s impossible to keep track of, really, but it’s wonderful.”

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.