Peter Godwin, an award-winning writer, is on assignment in Zululand when he is summoned by his mother to
Zimbabwe, his birthplace. His father is seriously ill; she fears he is dying. Godwin finds his country, once a postcolonial success story, descending into a vortex of violence and racial hatred. His father recovers, but over the next
few years Godwin travels regularly between his family life in Manhattan and the increasing chaos of Zimbabwe, with
its rampant inflation and land seizures making famine a very real prospect. It is against this backdrop that Godwin
discovers a fifty-year-old family secret, one which changes everything he thought he knew about his father, and his
own place in the world.
