A missionary takes his wife and four daughters to a tiny village in the Congo in 1959. As events will show he is not a particularly good missionary. Nor is he a particularly good husband or father, but he will shape and scar their lives indelibly with his certainties and his vanities and his colossal foolishness. The story is told through the voices of the wife and the four daughters, the women who will be made and remade by the missionary and by Africa, just as the Congo is being made and remade by other men with their own agendas and certainties and vanities. They're not very good missionaries or fathers to this country, either.

Told in the most beautiful, brilliant, expressive prose that describes lush jungles, the intricacies of village life, the thoughts and feelings of four girls and one woman as they struggle to live in this new place. Wonders and horrors abound, the everyday joys and cruelties of a community with its own ways and its own voices. The story takes us through the slow degradation of the missionary, mostly because of his own ignorance, to a terrible family tragedy that catapults the survivors out onto the larger tragedy of the Congo, it liberation and betrayal and brutal exploitation.

An incredible, epic, powerful, deeply moving novel that vibrates with anger and struggles with terrible questions of life and survival in the midst of brutality.