Her task seemed ridiculous, the result of a momentary weakness, of believing in the impossible, that stories have a trajectory where we find things out, resolve things to our satisfaction and come out the other side, wiser and happier

We cannot change the past, she thought. How we long to sometimes, trying to work out how horror might have been averted by a fluke of fortune, a kind intercession, wisdom not yet granted.

There are many ways to die in Africa's Great Rift Valley. The vulture observed them all. The manner of life's ending did not concern her, or whether the dying creature was animals or human, black or white. Immaterial. Death comes. The vulture comes.

The trouble was, Elizabeth thought, they did not tell the children of colonial families not to love these foreign lands, not to fall in love with their birthplaces. While parents dreamt of retiring in peace to another place called ‘home’, their children soaked up knowledge of the only world they knew: its different peoples, its spicy food, its birdsong, the way warm rain fell like a curtain through the palm trees. Their souls would be forever torn.