Following the death of his parents, Dabilly, a young white man, seeks a life of colonial adventure in Cote d'Ivoire. It is 1880 and Dabilly joins a beleaguered French general trying to set up trading routes into a coast as yet untouched by colonisation. A century later, a Black boy born to communist parents in Amsterdam begins to research his family history.

When he is sent to Cote d'Ivoire to visit his grandmother, he will discover traces of an ancestor he never knew existed. GauZ' looks across continents and centuries to create a portrait of two very different men, tracing the paths and histories that connect them and plunging us deep into the history of colonisation in the Cote d'Ivoire. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne