When his father suggests he take time off to visit estranged relatives, Emil sets aside his studies and, for reasons he doesn’t yet understand, moves to Stadmutter, a multiracial city at the southern tip of Africa. There, he is disquieted by days of aimlessness and by his encounters with Bolling, a wealthy Haitian-German who woos him intellectually and sexually, and with Tamsin, a PhD student working to define herself against a country still reeling from colonialism and racial Partition.