The award-winning author blends fiction and memoir in this novel of neocolonial corruption in the Congo.
Assigned to write an exposé on the elusive conservationist Richmond Hew, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo, a country he thinks he understands. But then he meets Sola, a woman looking for a white orphan girl who believes herself possessed by a skin-stealing demon. And he begins to uncover a tapestry of corruption and racial tensions generations in the making.
A harrowing search leads him into an underground network of sinners and saints, from an anthropologist who treats orphans like test subjects to a community of charismatic Congolese preachers and a revered conservationist who vanishes. Then there is the journalist himself, lost in his own misunderstanding of privilege and the myth of whiteness, and plagued by memories of his father.
