A fictional saga of passion and grief stretching from Uganda to Scotland. Covering themes such as love, war and ethnic cleansing, religion, adoption, and race.
Dembe, a fugitive of Idi Amin’s purges, cannot forget her father’s congregation cremated in the ashes of his church or the discovery of his empty shoes, the day after the soldiers came.
Only the hope that she can rescue five orphans propels a perilous escape to Kenya. It is a wrench to flee her village, and not only because it is her home. It is where Dembe’s former Scottish lover, Phil, sends her news of their son, Alfie, born to them during her student days in Glasgow. The Uganda of her youth was no place for an illegitimate child, and neither was her lover’s marriage; Dembe left him in care of the state, with only the hope of an adoption.
Phil, a Church of Scotland minister, unable to acknowledge the affair or forsake his son, manipulates his naïve wife Maggie to adopt the orphan boy into their own family.
But as the fly-wheel of Uganda’s civil war ejects those without a firm grip on the reins of power, Dembe finds herself on Phil’s doorstep and uneasily begins life with her lover, her child and her unwitting rival. They have never been closer or further from the truth - for now.