Memory of Departure is a novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, first published in 1987 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom.^[1] It is Gurnah's first novel. It follows a Muslim man in an unnamed African country who seeks to be educated abroad.^[2]

In a review for The New York Times, Richard E. Nicholls praised the novel as "fierce" and "vivid".^[2] Kirkus referred to the novel as "artfully spare" and indicated an expectation that "more good things" were to be written by Gurnah.^[3] In a 2022 article about Gurnah and his work, published by The New Yorker, Julian Lucas wrote that the novel "established a pattern that Gurnah continued to refine" through his subsequent work of "a ceaseless shuttling between the claustrophobia of home and the loneliness of exile".^[4]

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