A haunting debut by gifted young Ethiopian-American author and winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2007 Seventeen years after fleeing the revolutionary Ethiopia that claimed his father's life, Sepha Stephanos is a man still caught between two existences- the one he left behind, aged nineteen, and the new life he has forged in Washington D.C. Sepha spends his days in a sort of limbo- quietly running his grocery store into the ground, revisiting the Russian classics, and toasting the old days with his friends Kenneth and Joseph, themselves emigrants from Africa. But when a white woman named Judith moves next door with her only daughter, Naomi, Sepha's life seems on the verge of change...