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. The novel centers on eight people awaking 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.