Exit Wounds A Story of Love, Loss, and Occasional Wars

An “eloquent…beautiful” (The Wall Street Journal) memoir from award-winning writer Peter Godwin about his evolving relationships with the women and places that shaped his life.

Peter Godwin’s mother is dying.

Born in England, and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a hospital bed in the partitioned living room of his sister’s London home.

Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, a longing that does not diminish as he reflects on his time as a journalist on the frontlines of combat around the world, or life in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children. In his mother’s final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was and wasn’t: the secrets they kept from one another, the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them, and the beauty of the wildly different places they called home.

With generations of history behind him, Godwin lyrically brings us into the spaces which make us question and suffer, shows us how we can heal our own scars, and celebrate the lives we have among family and friends.

Peter Godwin was born and raised in Zimbabwe. He is the author of six nonfiction books including Mukiwa, which received the George Orwell Prize and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstones award, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, which won the Borders Original Voices Award. His book, The Fear, was selected by The New Yorker as a best book of the year. He has taught writing at Wesleyan and Columbia and served as President of the PEN American Center. He is an Orwell fellow and a Guggenheim fellow. He lives in New York City. Follow him on X @PeterGodwin.