Book
Brazzaville Beach
Hope Clearwater looks back from an isolated African beach on the two crises that brought her there. In England, her marriage to the mathematician John Clearwater deteriorated as his research became an obsession. In Africa, Hope joined the celebrated primatologist Eugene Mallabar and began observing a chimpanzee community whose behaviour challenged his influential theories.
When Hope records evidence of organised violence among the chimpanzees, scientific disagreement becomes a battle over reputation and truth. Beyond the research station, a civil war in a fictional African state brings another form of violence steadily closer. The novel moves between science, marriage and conflict to ask what people do when facts threaten the stories on which their careers and identities depend.
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Other books by William Boyd
