Professor Pi Suleman is a Black man from Memphis and proud of it. Still, he has to endure a lot as an adjunct professor at the city's prestigious University Along the Nile, a hard-earned career that is crushing his spirit. Pi is constantly forced to bite his tongue in the face of one of his tenured colleague's prejudice and microaggressions. At the same time, he's being blackmailed by a powerful UAN professor who threatens to claim he has assaulted her; he is unable to reveal that she is actually sexually violating him, trapped in a he-said-she-said with a white woman that, in this society, Pi knows he will never win.
 
When he meets Gemma Buckingham, a sophisticated entrepreneur who has just moved to Memphis from London to escape a deep heartbreak, things begin looking up. Though they hail from different cultures, their differences fuel a fiery and passionate connection that just may consume them both.
 
But Pi's whirlwind romance is interrupted when his absentee father, a celebrated author who long ago had an extramarital affair with his mother, passes away, and Pi is called to Los Angeles to collect his inheritance, learn about his father, and face the West Coast family that has never acknowledged him. With the complicated legacy of his famous father to make sense of, Gemma's VISA expiration date looming, and the threats of his colleague becoming increasingly intense, Pi must figure out who he is and what kind of man he will become in his father's shadow.
 
From Memphis to L.A. and back again, Eric Jerome Dickey takes readers on a powerful and intense journey as Professor Pi Suleman deals with sexual assault and racism, fights being changed by his father's truths, and also discovers untruths Gemma Buckingham has hidden for her own reasons...