Yet she couldn’t shake her interest in his legacy. “Livingstone is the only missionary who still has monuments to his name in almost every African country he traversed,” she said. “That says something extraordinary, I think, about his character.”

Image “Out of Darkness, Shining Light,” out in September from Scribner, is Petina Gappah’s fourth book. Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Inspired by William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” Gappah initially wrote her novel through the shifting perspectives of 15 characters , but she later pared it down to two: Halima, a cook who isn’t afraid to speak her mind ( “I do not know what I have ever done that I should be surrounded by ugly men,” she says at one point), and Jacob Wainwright, a former slave who received a formal education and became a translator.

[ “Out of Darkness, Shining Light” is one of our most anticipated September titles. Read more about it and the other 16. ]

“Middlemarch,” another of Gappah’s favorite books, also informed her approach. “What George Eliot does is center these huge reforms happening in England on individuals in a tiny little town,” she said. “That was a model that I thought, wow, that is something I could use in my own writing.”

With “Shining Light,” which Scribner is publishing in the United States on Sept. 10, she wanted to shed light on individuals like Halima and Jacob, who might not otherwise receive much attention, as well as on the East African slave trade that many of them witnessed firsthand.