Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of racism.

The novel begins in London six months after the death of protagonist Anna Graham’s mother, Bronwen Bain. Anna is a woman with a diverse racial heritage. Her mother is a white Englishwoman, while her father, Francis Aggrey, is a Black man. Anna knows little about her father beyond his name. Hailing from the fictional West African country of Bamana, Francis came to London in the 1960s to attend college. While boarding at the home of Anna’s great-grandfather, he met Bronwen and they conducted a brief, secret affair. Shortly after Bronwen became pregnant, Francis’s mother died, forcing him to cut short his university term and return to Bamana.

Now a middle-aged woman with an adult daughter of her own, Anna is curious about her father’s story. While sifting through her mother’s belongings, Anna opens a trunk that she found under her mother’s bed. Beneath a false bottom, she finds a scrapbook containing photos of Francis and two notebooks. The first notebook is Francis’s diary. In his earliest entries, Francis describes the virulent racism he faces from white Londoners. He is frustrated by his inability to stand up for himself in English; he has been “linguistically trained to turn the other cheek” (5) by the missionaries who taught him the language.