WHEN YOU READ the byline ‘Peter Godwin’, you know you are in safe hands. His autobiographical work Exit Wounds has just been published, and it’s truly a read in a million. It will take you to places so difficult you can’t believe you are there, and it will make you laugh and weep at the frailties of life.

Autobiography is easily one of the most misunderstood genres. You’ve had an interesting life? Write it all down, and you’ll make a mint! This well-intentioned advice never remembers or acknowledges that writing is a skill that needs to be honed, developed, polished. And it is difficult. Godwin’s work is a treasure.

Taking you unflinchingly from the bedside of his elderly mother, flailing with dementia but sometimes as spot on in her lucidity as she was when she was a young, freshly graduated doctor, the work contemplates the complex life of a Zimbabwean-born war correspondent, with English ties who calls America home. It’s about sibling love and what it means to lose a sister. It looks at Godwin’s relationship with his partner and his children with the kind of candour that can admit to his vulnerabilities as well as his strengths, without making it a laboured focus for the reader, on the boring domestic life of an absolute stranger.

Like Roger Cohen’s tribute to his mother’s illness, The Girl from Human Street, Exit Wounds offers profound insights into context and lives led. But unlike the Cohen book, he looks at the mental condition of a loved one from his own perspective, and without judgement. Seduced by alliteration and wont to veer on the side of hilarity with his sister in the face of the horror of illness, Godwin’s text is unstoppable and entertaining and switches comfortably between solemnity and the hysteria that comes of family injokes and too much seriousness. It evokes Incognito, Mark Verbaan’s 2014 beautiful collection of essays which looks at the world head on, even if it makes your eyes smart, as it touches on the great denouement of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 with regard to a bit of shrapnel: the entrance wound is always much neater than its corollary.

This is a book that can change your life. It’s a piece that sits comfortably alongside Vera Brittain’s 1933 Testament of Youth, in its reflection of a timeframe, and of the messy business of being human. It’s a keeper that you will not only wish to read once, but also to hold onto forever.

• Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars is written by Peter Godwin and published in 2024 by Picador Africa, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, Johannesburg.