Exit Wounds by Peter Godwin

When she turned ninety, my mother sprang a final surprise on us. She started speaking in the voice of a stranger.

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 apartment, her accent having overnight become posher than the Queen’s. Unsentimental, fiercely stubborn and at times hilarious, she finally drops her guard, losing all fear of conflict to become the family provocateur.

While confronting the revelations of what his family was – and wasn’t – and the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them, Peter also mourns the ending of his long marriage. At this point of rupture and healing, Peter reflects on his family’s legacy of exile and their tenuous hold on home.

In Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars, Peter Godwin considers, with both tenderness and candour, the life of émigrés, exiles and refugees, and grieves the many losses that make life both magnificent and unbearable. He brings us into the spaces that make us question, suffer and celebrate the relationships we have among family and friends, and the healing of our own wounds.

WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN is a story of the disintegration of a family, set against the collapse of a country.

Peter Godwin is living in Manhattan when he returns to Zimbabwe, his birthplace, having received the news that his father is dying. He finds the former breadbasket of a continent entering a vortex of violent chaos and famine. But his parents refuse to leave their home. Against this backdrop, Godwin discovers a fifty-year-old family secret: his father’s identity is an invention. This Anglo-African colonial in a safari suit and desert boots is, in fact, a Polish Jew whose family was torn apart by the Holocaust.

Peter Godwin’s powerful, moving memoir describes dark times and dark aspects of human behaviour spanning two continents and half a century; it is a searing portrayal of a son’s effort to rescue his family, and a family’s struggle to belong in a hostile land.