Kate Cooper

The Charcoal Burners Kate Cooper

In 1982 Grace McIntyre is living a bored and isolated existence as a reluctant expat in rural Western Kenya with her teacher husband, George, and their young son. She has made little attempt to integrate with the Africans around her. Her horizons begin to widen when she employs a new gardener, Isaac. Through Isaac, who has had to leave the university in Nairobi in unexplained circumstances, which Grace learns of over time, Grace is introduced to a Kenya, and its people, she hadn't met before, and comes to appreciate their embedded values and ways of life. Through learning about them, she learns much about herself. Over the course of three months the relationship between Grace and Isaac grows closer, but it is set against growing political unrest in the country, and, when Grace learns that Isaac is at the very heart of the subversion, she becomes unwittingly drawn into it. Things reach a climax in an abortive attempt to overthrow the government in a coup, and Grace is witness to the increasingly random violence that follows. She then has to decide between helping a desperate Isaac escape these reprisals, or abandoning him to take his own chances. Resolving this conflict is the biggest decision of her life.