Exit Wounds – A story of love, loss and occasional wars, by Peter Godwin (Picador Africa)

Peter Godwin has lived away from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe for a long time, well over 20 years, and yet it continues to define him. Or maybe it’s just that our childhoods do that to all of us.

He grew up in the Chimanimani Mountains, where his British-born mother was a doctor and his Polish-born father an engineer. He had an older sister and a younger sister, but the older one, Jain, died in an ambush, along with her fiancé, shortly after the outbreak of the Rhodesian war.

This memoir is dedicated to his sisters: “Georgina, who lived through so much of this with me. And Jain, who didn’t get to.”

Godwin has written four books: the prize-winning Mukiwa, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, The Fear, selected by the New Yorker as best book of the year, and now Exit Wounds.

Mukiwa and Crocodile particularly are memoirs, the first about his youthful years in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe including his compulsory military service, and the second about how his family starts to fall apart against a collapsing Zimbabwe.

This book, which Godwin says is not a conventional memoir, is less dramatic in its subject matter: it is about the life of a middle-aged man living in New York, whose mother is dying in London, whose sons are growing up and away, and whose marriage is failing, so that by the end he is left alone in the family apartment with the ageing dog, Phoebe.

However, the brilliance is all in the writing, and Godwin is nothing if not a fine writer. He has taught writing, at Wesleyan and Columbia.

As the book opens, Helen Godwin is 90, and now living with Georgina in London. She has taken to her bed “for no compelling medical reason”, and has also become imperious, both in accent and attitude. Having always been conflict averse, she now sheds her social filters and “seems almost to relish causing offence, especially to me”.

Peter frequently flies to London to read and chat to her, believing this will help stave off dementia, “but mostly I am trying to convince myself I am a good son”.

And then he writes the heart-breaking, painfully honest words: “There is a sad symmetry to our relationship. I spent the first decade of my life trying to summon my mother’s attention, and she has spent the last decade of hers trying to summon mine.”

Godwin describes Exit Wounds as “digressive and partial, intended to reflect the power of memory”, which is often odd and distorted.

And yet it’s a delight to read. It is also often very funny, as anyone who has watched a beloved elder slip away, will recognise.

At one point she tells him he speaks oddly. “What accent is that?” she inquires.

A sort of Zimbabwean one, he replies, adding: “I speak like this because I was born in Zimbabwe – where you decided to give birth to me. And raise me.”

Undaunted Her Grace replies: “Ah… livestock is raised. Children are brought up. You’ve been in America too long.”

They have some shattering conversations, mother and son, one in particular upsetting Godwin. How important is it for the dying to make parenting confessions? How necessary?

Fortunately Godwin has Georgina at hand, who takes much of the sting away.

But the book is not just about dying. It’s about joy and growing boys and the pleasure of the family’s weekend cottage away from New York. It is also about identity and exile and the profound question, for an immigrant, of where you belong, where is home.

One caveat, which is to do with the binding, and hardly Godwin’s fault: on page 23 a section of another book entirely had been bound into my copy of Exit Wounds. Then after about 25 pages we reverted to the original narrative, but missing those pages.

I checked in a book shop to see if all the copies were like mine, but they seemed fine. I then had to stand surreptitiously in the stacks and speed-read what I’d missed. So if you buy Exit Wounds, make sure your copy doesn’t have the same problem.

But it is certainly worth buying – and reading. If you are interested in how others negotiate love and loss and aging and identity, you are likely to find this book satisfying.

• Exit Wounds was one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for September.