No New Land - Softcover

Nurdin Lalani and his family, Asian immigrants from Africa, have come to the Toronto suburb of Don Mills only to find that the old world and its values pursue them. A genial orderly at a downtown hospital, he has been accused of sexually assaulting a girl. Although he is innocent, traditional propriety prompts him to question the purity of his own thoughts. Ultimately, his friendship with the enlightened Sushila offers him an alluring freedom from a past that haunts him, a marriage that has become routine, and from the trials of coping with teenage children. Introducing us to a cast of vividly drawn characters within this immigrant community, Vassanji is a keen observer of lives caught between one world and another.

M. G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. Before coming to Canada in 1978, he attended M.I.T., and later was writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa in their prestigious International Writing Program. Vassanji’s fiction to date comprises five novels and a book of short stories: The Gunny Sack (1989), which won a Regional Commonwealth Writers Prize; No New Land (1991); Uhuru Street (short stories, 1992); The Book of Secrets (1994), a national bestseller and the winner of the inaugural Giller Prize; Amriika (1999); and, most recently, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), which won The Giller Prize.

Vassanji was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize in 1994, in recognition of his achievement i