Ejersbo left behind 3 finished manuscripts for a trilogy consisting of Eksil [Exile], Revolution [Revolution] and Liberty [Liberty] to be published during the spring and autumn 2009.
Exile, Revolution and Liberty open up for an insightful tour de force into a continent that bleeds, where corruption rules, human life sometimes comes very cheap, and a white skin colour assures one status but not a place to belong.
The first volume, Exile, published April 2009, is set in Tanzania in the 1980s and tells the story of Samantha a young woman and a daughter of English immigrants. Samantha has to deal with her far from harmonious upbringing, growing up, and the feeling of not really fitting in anywhere; she’s English and white on the outside but speaks Swahili and has lived in Tanzania since she was three. Her insatiable appetite for love and life and her rebellious mind combined with the lack of fixed points in her life lead her out into a self-destructive spiral of alcohol and drugs. fixed point in one's life fixed point in one's life fixed point in one's life
We meet Samantha again in Revolution, published August 2009, as well as we meet the vivacious Sofie, half-Dane, half-Inuit, who enthrallingly, and with many, many stops along the way, eventually lands in Africa and feels at home for the very first time. We encounter young Indian girls struggling to free themselves from the iron hand of family; we descend into the tanzanite mines, where children and adults alike toil under horrifying conditions and where human life comes cheap; we enter the USA, to where a young African girl has travelled in search of the chance her skin-colour never will afford her in Africa; and we are in Helsinki, where we meet Jarno who has got a new job as a night watch.
In Liberty, which will be published November 2009, we meet Samantha’s friend Christian who is the son of Danish parents stationed in Moshi, Tanzania. The marriage is teetering and when Christian’s younger sister dies in a terrible car crash it falls apart and Christian feels increasingly left to his own devices. He befriends Marcus, an African boy his own age whose family background is even more fraught with problems than Christian’s own. A warm friendship develops, but something is not quite right: the white boy wants to be black and the black boy wants to be white.
Christian is sent home to Denmark to be looked after by a relative but he never feels at home. He returns to Africa, where he and Marcus strive with some measure of success to start a discotheque. But Christian has a foot in two very different cultures and without ever gaining a foothold he gradually drifts farther out towards existential homelessness, while Marcus runs adrift physically and mentally. Liberty is a gripping story of friendship for better or worse, a novel about the struggle to build a life in the no man's land between cultures.