Away from You

After 25 years in America, Ellie is drawn back to her East African roots, determined to make sense of her childhood memories and find out the truth about her violent and alcoholic father who brought her up in Kenya during the final years of colonialism. The narrative switches between Ellie's memory-laden journey and the story of her mother Helen coming to terms with life in 1960s Africa. Finding herself in some respects reliving her mother's experiences, Ellie grapples with the realization that, across the decades of political change, many aspects of African life have remained, at the personal level, remarkably constant.