4 ideas
Kweku Sai, a Ghanaian-born surgeon in Boston, is made the hospital's scapegoat when an elderly, well-connected patient dies after an operation, and he is fired. He cannot bear to tell his Nigerian wife Fola and their four children, so he pretends to go to work for months and then leaves the family without explanation, eventually returning to Accra. Years later he dies alone in his garden at dawn from a heart attack, without calling for help.
A parent who hides a humiliation to protect the family's image turns a public injury into a private absence. The wound the parent meant to contain gets passed down as each child's belief that they were not worth staying for.
After Kweku leaves, Fola cannot afford to keep the family together, so she sends the twins Taiwo and Kehinde to live with her half-brother Femi in Lagos. There he sexually abuses them, including coercing them into acts with each other.
The novel moves between the viewpoints of the dead father, the ex-wife and each of the four children. This shows that no single member holds the family's true story: each carries one piece of the break and misreads the others' behavior through it. Seeing the family whole requires assembling these private, contradictory accounts, which a death forces into the same room.