Just before her sixteenth birthday, missionary Reena Pavane stepped onto African soil and called it home. Four years later, she's swept from her post in Huzuni amid rumblings of war by British photojournalist Jim Stone, a man who loves East Africa and wants to tell its story and show its many faces. Staying true to their separate callings is complicated by their unexpected feelings for each other.

When Stone leaves hurriedly for a top-secret story but doesn't have his malaria medicine, Reena enlists the help of black man Dakimu Reiman to help her find Stone. Deep in the jungle, they discover Stone is being held by militants, and death for all seems inevitable.

The lives of Stone, Reena, and Dak evolve in the political turmoil of the 1950s and early 1960s in Tanganyika. Their personal goals, unrelated at the start, become increasingly dependent on and resolvable only inside their surprising and complex relationship. From the wild savannahs and forests of East Africa to England and the United States, spiritual, racial, and cultural barriers threaten and divide them. There is one thing among them that cannot be shaken and brings them to the harrowing edge of every choice they have made and every tenet they have believed. Their road to redemption is marked with controversy, self-doubt, and pain.