Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars

(Hardback, Main)

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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 house, her accent having overnight become posher than the Queen's.

Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, a longing that does not diminish as he reflects on being a conscript in the Rhodesian army in the 1970s, writing about conflicts across the African continent and beyond or settling in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children. In his mother's final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was - and wasn't: the secrets they kept from one another, the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them and the beauty of the wildly different places they called home.

In Exit Wounds, Peter Godwin considers the life of migrs, exiles and refugees, and grieves the many losses that make life both magnificent and unbearable. With generations of history behind him, he brings us into the spaces which make us question, suffer and celebrate the lives we have among family and friends, and the healing of our own scars.

Reviews

'Praise for Mukiwa: The life of the white boys and girls in colonial Africa has vanished now, but this fine and powerful memoir is a marvellous contribution to its literature' - WILLIAM BOYD

'Remarkable' - DORIS LESSING

'Praise for The Fear: The Fear is an important book . . . Godwin is passionate and personal, as well as bold in his travel and scrupulous in his documentation' - PAUL THEROUX

'The Fear is an urgent and essential book . . . it makes for relentlessly gripping reading' - PHILIP GOUREVITCH

'A feat of fearless reporting, this shattering story is not only an expose of the horrors of political violence, but a testament to the astonishing courage of ordinary citizens in the face of evil' - MELANIE THERNSTROM

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Author Bio

Peter Godwin was born and raised in Zimbabwe. He studied law at Cambridge University and international relations at Oxford. He is an award-winning foreign correspondent, author, documentary-maker and screenwriter. He is the author of six non-fiction books amongst which Mukiwa, which received the George Orwell Prize and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstones award, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, which won the Borders Original Voices Award. His book The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, was selected by the New Yorker as a best book of the year. Peter Godwin has taught writing at Princeton and the New School, and currently teaches at Wesleyan and Columbia. From 2012-15 he served as President of the PEN American Center. He is an Orwell fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

@petergodwin