The Cattle Killing

In plague-ridden eighteenth-century Philadelphia a young itinerant black preacher searches for a mysterious endangered African woman. His struggle to find her and save them both plummets them both into the nightmare of a society violently splitting itself into white and black. Spiraling outward from the core image of a cattle killing--the Xhosa people''s ritual destruction of their herd in a vain attempt to resist European domination--the novel expands its narrator''s search for meaning and love into the America Europe and South Africa of yesterday and today.