Safari

A brilliant and haunting novel about fatherhood and the unforeseeable repercussions of abandonment.

A neurotic novelist and stay-at-home father, whose own father went missing twenty years ago, begins seeing strange connections everywhere after meeting someone whose voice is eerily like the man he has never stopped trying to find.

“It takes two to play hide-and-seek”

That’s what the narrator of this novel hears when he comes to his senses. His eyesight had suddenly blurred, and he had lost sight of his four-year-old son, Elliott, in the Chicago greenhouse where they were walking.

The voice he hears now belongs to Gabriel, the young man who found Elliott. But it’s also his father’s exact voice—the voice of the man who disappeared without a trace from their home country decades ago, leaving his family behind. While the rest of the family moved on, the narrator, now a novelist living with his therapist wife, has spent a lifetime obsessing about missing persons cases, using his storytelling skills to invent closure for himself and others left behind.
But now, the voice he has always longed to hear again is right beside him.

Against the backdrop of Christmas celebrations and a tense family reunion with his larger-than-life mother and sister, the obsessive friendship with Gabriel turns the narrator’s life upside down—not only as a son, but also as a father himself