Medical Doctor's Debut Literary Epic - Important Contribution to Post-Colonial Fiction - Spectacular East African setting

+ Africa, Idi Amin, ancestors and a woman
+ Schoolboys, missionaries, aunties and diamond traders
+ Spirits, diviners fetishes and fears, recitations and augeries
+ Bandits and bullets, nomads and spears, ambushes and murder, spurned love and fatal obsessions, buried grief and blackmail
+ History and Settings: HM Stanley and the Mountains of the Moon,
the East African coast where Victorians made landfall, a Citroen DS, the Uganda mail train
+ Medicine, a disease called ‘Slim’, emergency surgery, mental breakdown

An epic tale of cross-cultural love and redemption set in the lands of the source of the Nile. Zachye Katura, tending cattle in the grasslands of Kaaro Karungi, and Michael Lacey, 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 . . . With superb unjudgemental skill, Andrew Sharp unfolds a story of men grown selfish by events. His lyrical prose takes the reader into a world of faith, spirits, belief systems and clash between Western and African medicine - surgery, terrors of 'Slim' disease (AIDS). Throughout, the memory of innocent boyhood lingers. Neither a bandit-soldier in the remnants of Idi Amin's rebel army, nor the restless detachment of a doctor, is allowed to corrupt the portrait of a shared beloved landscape. In an anguished denouement, the selfish become selfless as, with searing honesty, love and mortality are confronted. Two men; one woman: which one walks beside her on the shores of the Indian Ocean?