To satisfy his father's request that he rescue his drifting cousin, Emil - a young Creole from a wealthy background - sets aside his medical studies to move in with his working-class relatives in the unfamiliar city of Stadmutter - the mother city.
Among his indifferent kin Emil is first disquieted by days of aimlessness and then diverted by his sexual and intellectual encounters with Bolling, a rich, Haitian-German autodidact with preternatural charisma. Emil begins an ambiguous relationship with Tamsin, a graduate student obsessed with Sigmund Freud's theories and with her place in a society marked by shifting cultural hierarchies..
Beneath its veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. Through his relationships with Bolling and Tamsin, Emil is pulled into the orbit of Braeem Shaka - the leader of a Creole movement that is threatening the country's fragile racial progress with its demands for reparations - and ever further from the possibility of a return to his earlier life as a promising neurosurgeon.