From the author of the novel Paradise and nonfiction works Essays on African Writing 1: A Re-Evaluation and Essays on African Writing 2: Contemporary Literature comes Admiring Silence, the tale of an African man hopelessly enmeshed in a trap of his own making. After fleeing Zanzibar for England, the nameless narrator fathers a child by an English woman and struggles to come to terms with the racism he must confront as well as his ambivalence toward becoming part of English society. The brittle and fragile existence he builds for himself comes crashing down during a visit to his native land after many years away. There he realizes that he is an outcast from both worlds. Admiring Silence is a bitter and often bitterly funny look at the struggle to belong in an alien world.