LONGLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES LITERARY AWARD FOR NONFICTION
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 apartment, her accent having overnight become posher than the Queen's. Unsentimental, fiercely stubborn and at times hilarious, she finally drops her guard, losing all fear of conflict to become the family provocateur.
While confronting the revelations of what his family was - and wasn't - and the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them, Peter also mourns the ending of his long marriage. At this point of rupture and healing, Peter reflects on his family's legacy of exile and their tenuous hold on home.
In Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars, Peter Godwin considers, with both tenderness and candour, the life of émigrés, exiles and refugees, and grieves the many losses that make life both magnificent and unbearable. He brings us into the spaces which make us question, suffer and celebrate the relationships we have among family and friends, and the healing of our own wounds.
"[Godwin] is excellent at bringing in literary allusions to capture the gossamer quality of memory, skipping lightly but illuminatingly from Dorothy Parker to Emily Dickinson and from Philip Larkin to Vladimir Nabokov . . . Godwin takes palpable pleasure in language, and sometimes this produces poetry . . . Exit Wounds is an elegant, cerebral book" - * Sunday Times *
"Smart, observant, touching . . . deeply affecting" - * Spectator *
"Eloquent.beautiful.. Mr. Godwin writes about his ma with affection and careful detail. Gentle humor is ever-present" - * Wall Street Journal *
"This is an exceptional memoir, its stories told with such immediacy that the reader lives Godwin's days with him . . . Few people have described better the anguish of separation, the constant sense of not belonging, the quest for a centre that might hold. He writes humorously; but there is no mistaking the pain" - * Times Literary Supplement *
