Full Description
When his father suggests he take time off to visit estranged relatives, Emil—a young surgeon-in-training—sets aside his studies and, for reasons he doesn't yet understand, moves to Stadmutter, a multiracial city at the southern tip of Africa. There, he is disquieted by days of unaccustomed aimlessness and by his encounters with Bolling, a wealthy Haitian-German who woos him intellectually and sexually, and with Tamsin, a PhD student working to define herself against her country's shifting cultural hierarchies.
Beneath a veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. As Bolling's covert support for an upstart Creole movement threatens decades of racial progress, Emil is drawn increasingly toward exile.
