When 18-year-old Zack flees from Cameroon to Paris, he leaves his young mother to her fate and her secrets. The many questions he never asked her and the memory of all those he loved and abandoned, he closes deep within himself. Confronted with discrimination, but perfectly adapted to his new environment, Zack builds a life as a psychologist and family man, seemingly happy - until his past catches up with him and shakes everything up. A few decades earlier, his grandfather Zacharias, who lives as a fisherman with his family in a small coastal village, experiences how the traditional life of the family is turned upside down by a large timber company and the industrialization of fishing. Hemley Boum has artfully interwoven the two narrative strands. The result is a moving novel that makes visible the indissoluble interdependencies of the generations across the boundaries of space and time, that tells of guilt and atonement, forgiveness and reconciliation.