Awards

• Long-listed for Sunday Times Literary Award for Nonfiction 2025 (South Africa)
• Short-listed for SA Book Award Non-Fiction Prize 2025 (South Africa)
• Short-listed for SA Book Award Non-Fiction Prize 2025 (UK)

Overview

'Masterful' DAVE EGGERS 'Unforgettable' MAGGIE SMITH 'Profound' CLAIRE MESSUD 'Will leave you breathless' AMINATTA FORMA When she turned ninety, my mother sprang a final surprise on us. She started speaking in the voice of a stranger. 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 house, her accent having overnight become posher than the Queen's.Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, a longing that does not diminish as he reflects on being 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 mother's final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was - and wasn't: 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 émigrés, 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 which make us question, suffer and celebrate the lives we have among family and friends, and the healing of our own scars.

Full Product Details

9781837260829

Table of Contents

Reviews

[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 * * 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 Smart, observant, touching . . . deeply affecting * * Spectator * * Magnificent and moving -- TAN TWAN ENG A memoir on love, loss and life, of rare candour and intimacy, utterly compelling, by a truly brilliant writer -- PHILIPPE SANDS Eloquent.beautiful.. Mr. Godwin writes about his ma with affection and careful detail. Gentle humor is ever-present -- Tunku Varadarajan * * Wall Street Journal * * This is an exceptional memoir, its stories told with such immediacy that the reader lives Godwin's days with him . . . Few people have described better the anguish of separation, the constant sense of not belonging, the quest for a centre that might hold. He writes humorously; but there is no mistaking the pain * * Times Literary Supplement * *

Author Information

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

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