White

The award-winning author blends fiction and memoir in this “captivating, careening, thrilling, and magical” novel of neocolonial corruption in the Congo (Foreword Reviews, starred review).

Assigned to write an exposé on the elusive conservationist Richmond Hew, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo, a country he thinks he understands. But then he meets Sola, a woman looking for a white orphan girl who believes herself possessed by a skin-stealing demon. And he begins to uncover a tapestry of corruption and racial tensions generations in the making.

A harrowing search leads him into an underground network of sinners and saints—from an anthropologist who treats orphans like test subjects to a community of charismatic Congolese preachers and a revered conservationist who vanishes. Then there is the journalist himself, lost in his own misunderstanding of privilege and the myth of whiteness, and plagued by memories of his father.

These disparate elements coalesce into a map of Richmond Hew’s enigmatic movements in Deni Ellis Bechard’s “self-aware, self-immolating interrogation of colonialism, whiteness, and fiction” with fascinating echoes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.