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Award-winning writer Peter Godwin’s memoir, focusing on middle age and his changing relationships with the three women who shaped his life
Peter’s mother is dying. Born in England and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a hospital bed in the partitioned living room of his sister’s London apartment, her accent having overnight become posher than the Queen’s. Unsentimental, fiercely stubborn and at times hilarious, she finally drops her guard, losing all fear of conflict to become the family provocateur.
While confronting the revelations of what his family was – and wasn’t – and the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them, Peter also mourns the ending of his long marriage. At this point of rupture and healing, Peter reflects on his family’s legacy of exile and their tenuous hold on home.
In Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars, Peter Godwin considers, with both tenderness and candour, the life of émigrés, exiles and refugees, and grieves the many losses that make life both magnificent and unbearable. He brings us into the spaces which make us question, suffer and celebrate the relationships we have among family and friends, and the healing of our own wounds.
“[Godwin] is excellent at bringing in literary allusions to capture the gossamer quality of memory, skipping lightly but illuminatingly from Dorothy Parker to Emily Dickinson and from Philip Larkin to Vladimir Nabokov … Godwin takes palpable pleasure in language, and sometimes this produces poetry … Exit Wounds is an elegant, cerebral book”
sunday Times
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“A profound account of this strange time of life we’re all in – when all the certainties we thought we’d sorted out are collapsing around us and we’re suddenly like naked children in the wilderness … This moving memoir is an essential addition to Peter Godwin’s brilliant oeuvre”
Claire Messud
“Finely wrought, contemplative, intimate, lyrical and searingly emotionally honest, Exit Wounds is a story of war and love and of tragedy. In a life that has been marked by loss: of a birthright, a nation, of family and finally of his marriage, Peter Godwin traverses the wilderness of grief towards redemption. Exit Wounds will leave you breathless and imprint itself indelibly upon your heart”
Aminatta Forna
“So funny, so elegant, so erudite, and as a portrait of an extraordinary mother and the family she made, it is masterful, moving and unforgettable”
Dave Eggers
“Like Rembrandt, each unflinching portrait-in-prose illuminates Peter Godwin’s extraordinary life. His masterwork”
Richard E. Grant
Peter Godwin
Peter Godwin was born and raised in Zimbabwe. He is the author of six non-fiction books including Mukiwa, which received the George Orwell Prize and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstones award, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, which won the Borders Original Voices Award. His book The Fear was selected by the New Yorker as a best book of the year. He has taught writing at Wesleyan and Columbia, and served as President of the PEN American Center. He is an Orwell fellow and a Guggenheim fellow. He lives in New York City.
@petergodwin