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ABDULRAZAK GURNAH was born in 1948 in Zanzibar and moved to Britain in 1968. He is the author of seven novels, among them the Booker-shortlisted Paradise (1994), which is set in East Africa before the First World War and questions paradisiacal visions of Africa as it explores the displacement of young Yusuf, uprooted from his parents' home to live as a domestic slave in the household of a wealthy merchant. When discussing his writing, Gurnah has described recollection as the writer's hinterland and has insisted that travelling away from home intensifies one's sense of a life and a way of being that are lost forever. Memory and displacement are crucial elements in his novels, several of which move between East Africa and Britain, presenting migrant characters whose uprooting is not assuaged by a sense of belonging in the old country. If nostalgia exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near in a pure harmonious vision, the memories of Gurnah's migrants frequently debunk nostalgic visions of the past and the homeland. The present article explores the role of displacement, memory, and idealized constructions of the homeland in By the Sea (2001), the narrative of an elderly asylum-seeker in Britain in the 1990s who has ambivalent feelings towards his past life on his native island of Zanzibar. His homeland was occasionally a garden of love and delight, but it could also become a hell of hatred and disorder. Even though Saleh Omar's remembrances cannot bring back a comforting vision of his homeland as a paradise of peace and harmony, the novel seems to suggest that the main antidote to destruction is the ability to remember and spin stories from the land of memory. The protagonist of By the Sea has a chance to trace the shadows of his past through his first-person narrative, and the power of storytelling allows him in his old age to come to terms with his losses and accept with equanimity his present condition as a stranger in a strange land. In a sense, Saleh Omar finds himself at the end of his life like Adam in Book XII ?? Paradise Lost, who, as the archangel Michael tells him, has achieved sufficient wisdom to face the world: what is...