The Blue Taxi

When a young boy loses a leg after being hit by a drunk driver in his East African town of Vunjamguu, the shockwaves that run through his small community force a Belgian expat housewife to re-evaluate her life. Raised by nuns in a secluded mission hospital, Sarie Turner is lonely and isolated from everyone around her, contemptuous of her social-climbing British husband, Gilbert, and at odds with her snooty British contemporaries. Against Gilbert's wishes, Sarie and her young daughter, Agatha, visit the injured boy as he recovers, and Sarie becomes infatuated with the boy's handsome, anguished widower father, Majid Jeevanjee. Sarie seduces Majid; as their affair becomes a respite from her unfulfilling marriage, her feelings toward her husband and the coterie of high-class expats change in unexpected ways. The world Köenings has created in her accomplished debut is tragic and exhilarating, as is her portrayal of weary, left-behind colonialists, poverty-stricken natives and the uneasy manner in which each regards the other. (Oct.)