In the East African Kwatee Republic of the 1990s, the dictatorship is about to fall, and the nation s exiles are preparing to return.One of these exiles, a young man named Kalumba, is a graduate student in the United States, where he encounters Mrs. Shaw, a professor emerita and former British settler who fled Kwatee s postcolonial political and social turmoil. Kalumba s girlfriend, too, is an exile: a Puerto Rican nationalist like her imprisoned father, she is an outcast from the island. Brought together by a history of violence and betrayals, all three are seeking a way of regaining...