An eye-opening account of the Rwandan civil war and an achingly tender portrait of a family at odds. Embedded in real events, the novel takes us on an unforgettable journey through the Congo, Germany, and Brooklyn as it examines one family's passage through genocide and grief. Jacob Furman has always chosen his call to duty over his wife, Susanna, and their son, Shalom. When he's deployed to the Congo as a Mossad operative to help the Tutsis in their fight against the Hutus, Susanna and Shalom are left once again to contemplate his absence. Susanna, a Holocaust survivor and an esteemed linguistics scholar, buries herself in work as she searches for the biological roots of human language, while Shalom, overwhelmed by the accomplishments of his parents, struggles in search of his identity.After years apart, a fragile reunion borne out of illness sparks a sense of family they never had before, connecting the three to a web of emotion not just to one another, but to the political events that have defined our century.