After the death of his mother, the narrator finds an album in a drawer containing photos of his early childhood, which he spent on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago. As a young woman, the daughter of "stump workers" from Aargau had embarked on an adventure with a faggot from the West Indian upper class and had a child. While the rest of the family tries to erase the memory of the mother's years with the "savages", the narrator sets out to save this story, which is also his own.
Tabak und Schokolade takes us into the tropical jungle of a British crown colony in the fifties and sixties. As the narrator moves closer and closer to his Indian ancestors, who were shipped to the Caribbean as contract workers, he uncovers not only a family tree, but also a piece of colonial history. This is juxtaposed with the memory of growing up in his grandparents' "tobacco house" in Aargau and the rapprochement with a mother who always seemed unapproachable during her lifetime. (Publisher)