The Ghosts of Eden

Winner of the 2010 Waverton Good Read Award and shortlisted for the 2011 Rubery International Book Award, The Ghosts of Eden is the story of two men, one black, one white, who fall in love with the same woman. Which man will walk beside her on the shores of the Indian Ocean? Zachye, tending cattle in the grasslands of Kaaro Karungi, and Michael, the child of missionaries, are happy in their childhood idyll. But the world around them is changing, propelling them towards tragedy. Haunted by grief and guilt, they grow up severed from their families and ancestral heritage. When they both fall in love with the same beautiful woman, they must each face their past and hear their ancestors, if they are to be the one to win her. In lyrical prose the author unfolds a compelling story of loss, infatuation, atonement and the inheritance of love. In a world where ancient ways of life and belief are being overwhelmed by the new, neither a bandit-soldier in the remnants of Idi Amin's army, nor a restless and detached doctor, can escape the memory of innocent boyhood. Nomads, missionaries, expatriates, game wardens, Indian traders share a landscape haunted by ancestral ghosts. The reader is drawn on to a moving denouement where love and mortality are confronted.