Exit Wounds, like Peter's earlier works, Mukiwa and When A Crocodile Eats the Sun, will be a family memoir. At ninety, Peter's mother measures her longevity against two pacers. The Queen, who is eight months her junior, and whom she considers a colleague - they both served in the WRENS in the war. And her nemesis, Robert Mugabe, who misruled Zimbabwe for the last thirty years she lived there. He is one year her senior and she is determined to outlive him.
This is a book about the price you pay for seeing too much, a book about losing your bearings, a book about trying to find your way home. It's about exile, physical and spiritual. About homesickness, even when you're not sure where that is anymore. About love and loss, about nature, and about death. It's about what it means to be a man with a weakness for strong women. Of the three women who've dominated my life - my mother, my wife, my sister - by the end of the book, one is dead, one has left, one lives an ocean away.
It's a rumbunctious, riotous book, infused with the spirit of inquiry, veined with humor, a humor deployed as a shield against sorrow. It's an homage to curiosity and how curiosity can save your life. It's about language and poetry and the shibboleths we erect around identity. And it's about the search for belonging.
- ISBN10 1805300954
- ISBN13 9781805300953
- Publish Date 5 September 2024
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Canongate Books
- Edition Main
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 240
- Language English