Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa

One Sunday morning in her suburban home in Connecticut, Wendy Kann received a phone call: her youngest sister, Lauren, had been killed on a lonely road in southern Africa. With that news, Kann is summoned back to the territory of her youth in what is now Zimbabwe. The girls’ privileged colonial childhood, a rural life of mansions and servants, is devastated by their father’s premature death, their mother’s insanity, and the onset of civil war. Kann soon leaves Africa, marries an American, and has finally settled into the dry sophistication of life in the States when her sister’s death calls her back.

With honesty and compassion, Kann pieces together her sister’s life, explores the heartbreak of loss and the struggle to belong, and finally discovers a new, more complicated meaning of home.