After a two-decade silence, Astrid Roemer returns with a luminous exploration of memory, identity, and the reverberations of colonialism In 1966 Suriname, as the shadow of colonial rule lingers, Grandma Bee lies dying. The matriarch of a sprawling, mixed-heritage family – Creole, Maroon, French, Indian, Indigenous, British, Jewish – she commands with a sharp tongue and a smouldering cigar. But as her body falters, so too does the reckoning: with loss, memory, and the bonds that remain when bloodlines scatter. As illness takes hold, her thoughts return to Heli, a beloved granddaughter exiled to the Netherlands after an affair with her white teacher. She reflects on her descendants – strangers to one another, scattered across continents. What binds them together? What endures when history has fragmented the idea of kin?