In the Borderlands

About the Book

An American, Dr. Nona Whitley, joins the massive humanitarian relief operation for more than one million refugees of the Rwandan genocide and civil war.  Highly capable and experienced, she imagines the difficult environment will serve as both a penance for familial sins, and an escape from a problematic love relationship that has raised the specter of past failures.  Her work in a sprawling border camp brings her into intimate and harrowing contact with the horrors that an extremist government has visited upon its people.

   At the same time, two Rwandan lovers fleeing their gutted village are caught up in the chaos and separated.  The woman delivers their baby alone in a banana grove. She struggles to the apparent safety of the border camp, only to be confronted again with the evil she fled.  Her lover is forced to serve the insurgent rebel army.

   In the refugee camp, the doctor recovers their newborn infant from a latrine. The challenge of restoring the baby to health and to the parents calls into question everything Nona values.  Ultimately, the experience forces a reckoning with her guilty secret, her identity as a woman, and with the man who refuses to stop loving her.

   Set in an environment unknown to most Westerners during events that tore apart a nation, In the Borderlands is a story of survival and transformation.

About the Author

Susan Burgess-Lent has been writing non-fiction –- from television scripts to magazine articles to press releases -- for over twenty years. In the Borderlands, based on one of the few events to incite two years of sustained creative effort, is her first novel. She lives with her husband and daughter near Washington, DC.