Early one morning in 1899, an Englishman named Martin Pearce stumbles out of the desert into an East African coastal town and collapses at the feet of Hassanali, a local shopkeeper. When Hassanali's sister, the beautiful and disillusioned Rehana, nurses Pearce back to health, a love affair sparks, with consequences that will ripple decades into the future when another clandestine affair bursts into flame with equally unforeseen and dramatic consequences. In this devastating and ingeniously spun tale, Nobelist Abdulrazak Gurnah brilliantly dramatises the personal and political legacies of colonialism.