Ellis Hock runs a menswear store in Massachusetts but still dreams of the four years he spent in Malawi. When his wife leaves him, he realises that there is one place for him to go: back to Malawi on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again. Arriving at the dusty village he finds it transformed, but the locals remember him and welcome him back. Is his new life an escape or a trap?

Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, this is a hypnotic, compelling and brilliant return to a terrain no one has written better about than Theroux.