Book Publishers Association of Alberta

Set in Sierra Leone in the early 1990s, White Elephant centres around the Berringers, a troubled Nova Scotian family who decide to abandon their recently-completed dream home in Canada and move to a village in northern Sierra Leone, despite warnings that the West African country is in a civil war. When the novel begins, Richard Berringer, a physician, his wife, Ann, and their thirteen-year-old son, Torquil, have been in Sierra Leone for two months, and things are not going well. Plagued by mysterious allergies and a series of tropical illnesses and trying unsuccessfully to broker a peace between her embattled husband and son, Ann is desperate to heal herself and her family. Richard, unable to tolerate Torquil’s behaviour or continue feigning sympathy for Ann’s ailments, takes solace in the satisfaction of practicing tropical medicine–but a mounting conflict with his boss threatens to put an end to that. Meanwhile, Torquil—who hates Sierra Leone almost as much as he hates his father—has gone on a hunger strike in an effort to convince his mother to take him back to Canada. As the story progresses, both the war and the family’s domestic hostilities escalate, and like their impossible-to-sell home, the dream of harmonious family life that it represented also proves itself to be a white elephant—something so dear that it becomes a burden.