The road builder

Will and Kate Haslin, two young Americans, travel to Ngemba, a village in Africa. They know little about life there, and their own relationship is not yet settled. Their trip has a hidden purpose: to learn about the murky history of Kate's stubborn uncle Pers, who is dying. Stranded in a wide savanna, with only a few words of a shared language, they have to remake themselves within a community that has no set expectations for them. When they begin to suspect that Uncle Pers might be the Road Builder, a mysterious figure tied to the colonial era, the danger they face becomes personal.

In Ngemba, history blends with myth, fable and rumor, so that a person sometimes has to imagine the truth in order to see it. The village is home to a closed community of pragmatists and dreamers, who hold that the only escape from a place is to press deeper into it. Above all, Ngemba is a tense, dreamy place where Will and Kate learn to dream about what they actually know.

Nick Hershenow's debut novel uses rich, graceful prose to raise questions about truth, reality and memory. It follows a man and a woman who must define themselves against a series of unanswered mysteries, in a story that is both epic and intimate.