When his wife and child leave him, Ellis Hock journeys back to Malawi on the remote Lower River, an area he hasn’t returned to since his years with the Peace Corps. But when he arrives, he finds that poverty and apathy have transformed the village he once so idealized.

Paul Theroux, popular for both his travel books and his fiction, has produced an off-beat story of 1960s weirdos unlike anything he has ever written.