Author Description

No New Land is an original, wryly humorous novel by M. G. Vassanji, the acclaimed author of the short-story collection Uhuru Street and the recently published novel, The Book of Secrets. His highly praised first novel, The Gunny Sack, won a Regional Commonwealth Prize. It is the mid-1970s: 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. The story begins when Nurdin, a genial orderly at a downtown hospital, comes home one night with the news that he has been accused of sexually assaulting a girl. We meet the Lalani family and a cast of wonderfully drawn characters. There is the slick, up-and-coming lawyer Jamali; his teacher friend Nanji, a moral questioner and a romantic; Esmail, a baker, who falls victim to a near fatal racial incident; the irrepressible Romesh, from Guyana, who introduces Nurdin to the forbidden pleasures of the city. Nurdin Lalani's story is told with a fine sense of life's ambiguities and the possibilities of renewal. Although he is innocent of assaulting the girl, traditional propriety prompts him to question the purity of his own thoughts. His friendship with the lovely 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.