India, June 19 -- "We can endure any truth, however destructive, provided it replaces everything, provided it affords as much vitality as the hope for which it substitutes," writes the Romanian philosopher EM Cioran in his classic The Trouble with Being Born. This quote characterises the Tanzanian-British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah's latest novel, Theft - his first since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. A testament to Gurnah's dedication to telling the stories of "little people who somehow overcome things", it is divided into three parts. The first offers a slow reveal of characters and historical contexts. Perhaps this is Gurnah's nod to Tolstoy, whose short story Polikushka is invoked in a conversation in this novel. Here,...