Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss, and Occasional Wars

by Peter Godwin Narrated by Peter Godwin

Overview

From award-winning author Peter Godwin, an “eloquent” (The Wall Street Journal) memoir about his evolving relationships with the women and places that shaped his life.

Peter Godwin's mother is dying.

Born in England, and having spent most of her adult life as a doctor in Zimbabwe, she now lies on a hospital bed in the partitioned living room of his sister's London home.

Peter has spent his life missing his Zimbabwean childhood, a longing that does not diminish as he reflects on his time as a journalist on the frontlines of combat around the world, or life in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children. In his mother's final months, he must come to terms with everything his family was and wasn't: the secrets they kept from one another, the stoicism that sometimes threatened to destroy them, and the beauty of the wildly different places they called home.

With generations of history behind him, Godwin lyrically brings us into the spaces which make us question and suffer, shows us how we can heal our own scars, and celebrate the lives we have among family and friends.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Elegiac....Godwin contends with his wounds through reflection, humor, and quiet resolve.”
—The New Criterion

“Eloquent...beautiful.... Mr. Godwin writes about his ma with affection and careful detail. Gentle humor is ever-present.”
—Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal

“Often absurdly funny....Godwin has experienced enough loss to know that humor and grief can, and should, occupy the same space.”
—Dina Gachman, the New York Times

“A search-and-not-destroy mission to dissolve entrenched inhibitions, moral ambiguities, and the numbness of survivor’s guilt....A quiet reminder of the possibility of rebirth.”
—Celia McGee, AirMail

“Exit Wounds is riveting, heart-rending and borderless in its brilliance and sympathy. What a book.”
—Joseph O’Neill, author of Godwin

“Finely wrought, contemplative, intimate, lyrical and searingly emotionally honest, Exit Wounds is a story of war and love and of tragedy. In a life that has been marked by loss: of a birthright, a nation, of family and finally of his marriage, Peter Godwin traverses the wilderness of grief towards redemption. Exit Wounds will leave you breathless and imprint itself indelibly upon your heart.”
—Aminatta Forna, author of Happiness

“This profound and moving memoir is an essential addition to Peter Godwin’s brilliant oeuvre: he explores how we carry our imaginary homelands through loss and upheaval, how we make and remake our vulnerable selves. I loved this book.”
—Claire Messud, New York Times bestselling author of The Burning Girl

“This is one of my favorite books of the last decade. It's so funny, so elegant, so erudite, and as a portrait of an extraordinary mother and the family she made, it is poignant, masterful, and unforgettable.”
—Dave Eggers, author of A Hologram for the King

“EXIT WOUNDS is an apt metaphor for the leavings and losses in Peter Godwin’s unforgettable new memoir. Here dislocation and exile are both geographical and personal: Where does a “cultural centaur” belong? Where is home when a marriage ends? What is home? I was so enchanted by Godwin’s prose, his insights, his deft use of imagery, and the conversations between mother and son, husband and wife, brother and sister—some heartbreaking, some funny, some walking that tightrope between—that I didn’t want this brilliant book to end. Exit Wounds, indeed.”
—Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“EXIT WOUNDS is, quite simply, a masterpiece. Peter Godwin spins literary gold out of shards of heartbreak and humor. To see the world through Godwin’s eyes is to go on a journey of exploration and experience everything old as new again and all that is new as the oldest of human stories.”
—Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War

William Finnegan

A rich, shattering memoir of an extraordinary family. Lifted up by rueful humor, easy erudition, painful honesty, and deep affection, Peter Godwin’s story swings between Zimbabwe and New York, with time in London, where his formidable mother is dying. EXIT WOUNDS is a harrowing, gorgeous account, ultimately, of his own long search for home.

Dave Eggers

This is one of my favorite books of the last decade. It's so funny, so elegant, so erudite, and as a portrait of an extraordinary mother and the family she made, it is poignant, masterful, and unforgettable.

Aminatta Forna

Finely wrought, contemplative, intimate, lyrical and searingly emotionally honest, Exit Wounds is a story of war and love and of tragedy. In a life that has been marked by loss: of a birthright, a nation, of family and finally of his marriage, Peter Godwin traverses the wilderness of grief towards redemption. Exit Wounds will leave you breathless and imprint itself indelibly upon your heart.

Dina Gachman

Often absurdly funny....Godwin has experienced enough loss to know that humor and grief can, and should, occupy the same space.

Amanda Foreman

EXIT WOUNDS is, quite simply, a masterpiece. Peter Godwin spins literary gold out of shards of heartbreak and humor. To see the world through Godwin’s eyes is to go on a journey of exploration and experience everything old as new again and all that is new as the oldest of human stories.

Celia McGee

A search-and-not-destroy mission to dissolve entrenched inhibitions, moral ambiguities, and the numbness of survivor’s guilt....A quiet reminder of the possibility of rebirth.

Tunku Varadarajan

Eloquent...beautiful.... Mr. Godwin writes about his ma with affection and careful detail. Gentle humor is ever-present.”

Claire Messud

This profound and moving memoir is an essential addition to Peter Godwin’s brilliant oeuvre: he explores how we carry our imaginary homelands through loss and upheaval, how we make and remake our vulnerable selves. I loved this book.

Joseph O’Neill

Exit Wounds is riveting, heart-rending and borderless in its brilliance and sympathy. What a book.

Maggie Smith

EXIT WOUNDS is an apt metaphor for the leavings and losses in Peter Godwin’s unforgettable new memoir. Here dislocation and exile are both geographical and personal: Where does a “cultural centaur” belong? Where is home when a marriage ends? What is home? I was so enchanted by Godwin’s prose, his insights, his deft use of imagery, and the conversations between mother and son, husband and wife, brother and sister—some heartbreaking, some funny, some walking that tightrope between—that I didn’t want this brilliant book to end. Exit Wounds, indeed.

Jon Lee Anderson

Compulsively readable as well as deeply moving

Tan Twan Eng

"Magnificent and moving."

Kirkus Reviews

2024-12-28
A courageous journalist faces hard truths at home.

The author, born in what is now Zimbabwe, was “a teenage combatant drafted into the Rhodesian civil war” and, later, a war correspondent. Godwin still has shrapnel in his face and back, but his battlefield experiences were well behind him when he recognized, with a therapist’s help, that he seems to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Godwin’s vivid sentences about “choking on…the gristle of grief” are powerfully relatable. Meanwhile, he recounts fundamental shifts elsewhere in his life. After decades as a doctor in Zimbabwe, Godwin’s mother, Helen, is dying in an English hospital. Godwin deftly blends sorrow and humor, sharing his amusement at Helen’s late-in-life adoption of an upper-crust accent and his fear that she felt “the wrong child” died when his sister, Jain, was killed. His mother had long been one of Godwin’s “twin pillars.” The other: his wife, Joanna Coles, the former editor ofCosmopolitan, who chides Godwin for writing about relative unknowns instead of George Clooney’s charitable work in Darfur. One day, “apropos of nothing,” Godwin recalls, Coles says she wants to end the marriage. In part, their eventual split happened because “she feels more successful than me.” He adds, “She may be right.” Godwin writes evocatively about the “ineffable sense of loss” he feels as a white African living in England and the U.S. Though his fixation on alliterative cuteness gets old—out walking his dog, he searches for “a pristine poop port”—he has lots of memorable anecdotes. He once wrote what he thought “was a rave review” of a J.M. Coetzee book. The Nobel Prize winner might have disagreed; a later Coetzee novel, Godwin writes, features a “dull, defensive, ill-informed and pompous” character. His name? Peter Godwin.

A buoyant memoir about death, divorce, and war’s psychological toll.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192139264
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/08/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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