Peters 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 sisters London house, her accent having overnight become posher than the Queens.

Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, whether as a conscript in the Rhodesian army in the 1970s, writing about conflicts across the African continent and beyond or settling in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children. In his mothers final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was and wasnt: the secrets they kept from one another, the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them and the beauty of the wildly different places they called home.

In Exit Wounds, Peter Godwin considers the life of migrs, exiles and refugees, and grieves the many losses that make life both magnificent and unbearable. With generations of history behind him, he brings us into the spaces that make us question, suffer and celebrate the lives we have among family and friends, and the healing of our own scars.