The Magic of Saida

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In his haunting new novel, two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji returns to the land and culture that has inspired his best and most timeless work: the coast of East Africa. The Magic of Saida tells the story of Kamal Punja, a successful Canadian doctor who, in middle age and after decades living in North America, goes on a quest to his homeland of Tanzania to search out his childhood sweetheart, the mysterious Saida. What Kamal finds is something else entirely - a complex truth that forces him to reexamine his own convoluted history, and that of his many-faceted country. A revelatory, compassionate, and ultimately shocking tale by one of our most acclaimed writers.

M.G. Vassanji is the author of six novels, two collections of stories, and two works of non-fiction. Two of his novels, The Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, won the Giller Prize, and his non-fiction book A Place Within: Rediscovering India won the Governor General's Literary Award. His most recent novel, The Assassin's Song, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Writers Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award. M.G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania, and attended university in the United States. He lives in Toronto.

Praise for M. G. Vassanji:

"Vassanji captures a wide and authentic perspective that ranks with V.S. Naipaul and Graham Greene."
—The Times (UK)

"Belonging in a category with Tolstoy's War and Peace, Vassanji's saga is sweeping in scope . . . complex, compelling, revelatory, and unforgettable."
—The Globe and Mail on the Giller-winning novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

"[The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is] brilliantly written and deeply felt, it is a resonant family novel that is also a brutally honest portrayal of the last half century of tumultuous Kenyan history. . . . Vassanji displays his great gifts; this beautiful novel, which unfolds with intimacy and an inexorable sense of destiny, is proof that fictional truth can illuminate an epoch in history like nothing else."-The Boston Globe

"[The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is] a novel of elegant gesture, complex understanding, bright passion, and historical pain."-O, The Oprah Magazine