An extraordinary novel of love, friendship, and betrayal for admirers of Abraham Verghese and Edwidge DanticatEleanor Morse’s rich and intimate portrait of Botswana, and of three people whose intertwined lives are at once tragic and remarkable, is an absorbing and deeply moving story.In apartheid South Africa in 1977, medical student Isaac Muthethe is forced to flee his country after witnessing a friend murdered by white members of the South African Defense Force. He is smuggled into Botswana, where he is hired as a gardener by a young American woman, Alice Mendelssohn, who has abandoned her Ph.D. studies to follow her husband to Africa. When Isaac goes missing and Alice goes searching for him, what she finds will change her life and inextricably bind her to this sunburned, beautiful land.Like the African terrain that Alice loves, Morse’s novel is alternately austere and lush, spare and lyrical. She is a writer of great and wide-ranging gifts.

In the heart of Botswana, the live of three ex-patriate Americans--a contract CIA agent undercover in the guise of an English instructor at a private school, his disaffected wife, and an iconoclastic black holistic physician--entangle with that of a local populist leader as a violent insurrection erupts in the area. 75,000 first printing.