At the start of Mark Jacob’s remarkable new novel, thirty-seven-year-old Smith wins a “stash” of diamonds in a poker game. The only catch: he has to find them.

A Louisiana native, Smith is employed on an oil platform off the west coast of Africa, while the diamonds are somewhere in the immense, war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. But Smith’s grown tired of the platform—one last adventure, he tells himself, and then, diamonds or no diamonds, he’s heading home.

Shortly thereafter, Smith meets a girl named Béatrice, who hails from a village on the other side of the country. This village, she tells Smith, is where his diamonds are—more than a thousand miles away on the patchwork of guerilla-patrolled roads that traverse the country. If he helps her get home, she’ll show him where the stones are. What follows is a harrowing tour of hell in which a not-so-innocent American abroad comes face-to-face with the legacy of European imperialism in the heart of the African continent. In stark prose, Jacobs reveals the limits of the western gaze to give us the story of a man who discovers you don’t have to travel to another country to get lost, and you don’t have to go home to be found.