Description
A comfortable suburban housewife with three children living in Connecticut, Wendy Kann thought she had put her volatile childhood in colonial Rhodesia–now Zimbabwe–at the back of her. Then one Sunday morning came a terrible phone call: her youngest sister, Lauren, had been killed on a lonely road in Zambia. unable to ignore her eager for her native land, she comes to a decision she should confront the ghosts of her past.
Wendy Kann’s is a personal journey, set against a backdrop as exotic as it is desolate. From a privileged colonial childhood of mansions and servants, her story moves to a young adulthood marked by her father’s death, her mother’s insanity, and the viciousness of a bloody civil war. Through unlikely love she finds herself in the incongruous sophistication of Manhattan; three children bring the security of suburban The usa, until the heartbreaking vulnerability of the small child her sister left at the back of in Africa compels her to go back to a continent she hardly recognizes.
With honesty and compassion, Kann pieces together her sister’s life, explores the heartbreak of loss and belonging, and in spite of everything discovers the actual meaning of home.