Whilst this could be seen as an interesting take on a beloved Africa revisited 40 years later, it wasn't for me. The expectations of returning to happy times and a simple life in Malawi is the route taken when the protagonist, Ellis Hock, loses his business, his wife and his daughter. He heads "home" with the idea of helping and improving the village he remembers so fondly but this feeling of benevolence and paternalism is all wrapped up in such moral superiority that I found myself disliking both character and narrative very quickly (even though I suspect the author required this). His expectations of parachuting himself in and finding a naive happiness is so flawed that I struggled to follow the precept.
A dark, tortured story whose fulcrum is corruption, post-colonialism and imported aid seen from the, inevitably opinionated, unsympathetic 1st world "hero" who cannot possibly be as foolish and as lacking in judgement as he seems.