‘Twisting, many-layered … Explores themes of race and betrayal with bitterly satirical insight’
– Sunday Times

He thinks, as he escapes from Zanzibar, that he will probably never return, and yet the dream of studying in England matters above that Things do not happen quite as he imagined – the school where he teaches is cramped and violent, he forgets how it feels to belong. But there is the beautiful, rebellious Emma, who turns away from her white, middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child. And in return he spins stories of his home and keeps her a secret from his family.

Twenty years later, when the barriers at last come down in Zanzibar, he is compelled to go back. What he discovers there, in a story
potent with truth, will change the entire vision of his life.

“There is a wonderful sardonic eloquence to this unnamed narrator’s voice’
– Financial Times

‘I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that is so convincingly and hauntingly
sad about the loss of home’
– Independent on Sunday