He thinks, as he escapes from Zanzibar, that he will probably never return, and yet the dream of studying in England matters above that. Things do not happen quite as he imagined - the school where he teaches is cramped and violent. But there is Emma who turns away from her white, middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child. Twenty years later, when the barriers at last come down in Zanzibar, he is able and compelled to go back. What he discovers there, in a story potent with truth, will change the entire vision of his life. A sad and haunting novel about the loss of home.