ABOUT
THE BOOK

In this autobiographical novel, an Irish-American woman who had lived in the West African country of Niger as the wife of an academic and the mother of three small children returns after seventeen years to visit her eldest daughter, Zara, who has herself returned to Niger during a season of devastating drought, Zara now works in a village clinic and treats children suffering from starvation.

Hill paints a compelling portrait of a community of women grounded in kinship and care for their children, a society characterized not only by pain and exhaustion but by humor, delicacy, and strength. The journey to a place six thousand miles from home is also a voyage inward. Visited by ancestral memories of the Irish Famine, the narrator is stirred by Muslim prayers that echo her own inherited, but neglected, faith.