Slim
Ruth Whitney’s debut novel is set in a small, interior country of Africa at the start of the AIDS epidemic.
The aged president is more aggrieved by a journalist calling his country “tiny” than by the presence of the disease that threatens to decimate it. Eight people awake one dry season to the scourge among them—a divorced young American orthopaedist, a fifty-eight-year-old Scotswoman of faith and gynecologist by profession, an idealistic young African journalist, a short-sighted president of a backward country, an ancient healer, a feckless father ruined by promiscuousness and greed, an ill-fated mother far from her native village, and a boy whose prophetic images haunt the heart of the novel.
Praise
“Here is not merely the story of AIDS, what the natives call Slim. Instead it is the story of a culture and a continent, of at least two faiths serving God, of love and its sometimes-horrible consequences, of power and fear, of the strange and the mundane. In brief, I am much taken, much charmed.”
—Lee K. Abbott, author of Wet Places at Noon
“A wise, gorgeous piece of work, both complicated and lucid, poetic in language and yet straightforward in the telling. The writing makes a happy marriage of magic and science, a distillation of the two that is both contemporary and ageless. These people were all very real to me, very specific but also very complicated. I lived with them and felt their rages, their anxieties, their small joys. The whole book is a deep mystery that’s been given heft, presence, that’s taken up residence with the reader.”
—Liza Wieland, author of Bombshell and You Can Sleep While I Drive