Exit Wounds

Peter’s mother is dying. Born in England, and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a hospital bed in the partitioned living room of his sister’s London house, her accent having overnight become posher than the Queen’s. Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, a longing that does not diminish as he reflects on being a conscript in the Rhodesian army in the 1970s, writing about conflicts across the African continent and beyond or settling in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children. In his mother’s final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was – and wasn’t: the secrets they kept from one another, the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them and the beauty of the wildly different places they called home.