This is simply a beautiful book with well developed characters, scene setting that makes you want to hop a jet to Africa, real emotion, and a wonderful story of love and longing, betrayal, adventure and everyday life. I love this book! With apologies to Barbara Kingsolver, it's similar in that it's set in Africa, it's about a minster, his wife and their children and their time in that strangely intoxicating country, but it's so much more readable than Kingsolver whom I never finished. One of the most interesting aspects of Rosa Shand's novel is the beginning paragraph of each chapter in which she sets a scene or merely ponders on something unrelated to the action. These pieces are so very poetic in themselves. And then there's the story -- Agnes, who many women will relate to, who cannot "will herself" to love her unconnected husband, fantasizes about a man who she becomes inevitably bound with. But enough of that, read it yourself, you won't regret it. (And who in their right mind would call this book racist? The "reviewer" clearly missed the point if he/she even read beyond the first chapter...) Rosa Shand, please write more!

In The Gravity of Sunlight, Rosa Shand explores one woman's desires for a fulfilled life beyond her marriage and motherhood. Set in Africa in the 1970s, The Gravity of Sunlight provides a look into the heart of an American woman who comes to terms with her own desires. Agnes remains true to her self while feeling torn between her wanting to do what is right and what will allow her to best express her needs. She chooses the latter. She does this at some expense to her family. However, the reader will want to cheer this character on. One cannot help but feel connected to her. Rosa Shand does a beautiful job with this novel. I especially enjoyed the exerpts at the beginning of each chapter. They helped create set the mood and provided me with an insight into the true heart of the novel. On the down side, I did not find the love scenes between Agnes and Wulf to have much substance. They should have maybe been more vivid, not graphic. But more descriptive. They seemed a bit abrupt in the novel and I know there was more to them than that. Overall, I do recommed this book. Both men and women would enjoy it.

Rosa Shand's first book is filled with simple but beautiful language, description of the physical and the emotional experience of living in Uganda during the time right before and during Idi Amin's political coup. As the story unfolds, Shand manages to very gently capture the very complicated relationships between husband and wife, wife and lover, amidst the rhythms of life in a foreign land, all which help make this a very successful debut novel.

Agnes is our narrator, and she, her husband John and their young children have moved to Uganda. John is a professor teaching at the college; Agnes teaches part-time at the lower school. Each of them is lost in their respective idealisms, and their relationship is suffering for it, as they don't seem to have an intimate connection on any real level. Agnes, who is always searching to fulfill what she feels is a lack of meaningful attachment to her husband, meets Wulf, who is also teaching at the university, and is a friend of her husband's, they embark on a tentative relationship.

What works about this novel, is that this affair, in all its various stages and with all its various consequences, is written in a way that echoes the lifestyle and the political uncertainties of the country. Shand weaves Agnes' story with an intimate look at a society very different from Agnes'and our own, and these dual storylines are revealed piece by piece to the reader as the circumstances of Agnes' daily life allows. She uses deceptively simple language to tell a story of many layers, each one as lush and as precarious as the next. A fine book to curl up with on a wintry weekend, which is about how long it will take to read.