Rhodesia, 1972.
Tessa Harmand is nine-years-old when a humiliating experience forever alters her na- perception of the society in which she lives, forcing her to question her own attitude to her black compatriots - an attitude she-s inherited from her elders.
Nathan Owen is twelve-years-old, dark haired and inscrutable. To Tessa, he is a dead-pan, distant ghost flitting into view and then dissolving in a blink- but an odd conversation with him only serves to heighten Tessa-s new and unwelcome awareness of the political uncertainty.
As the first whisperings of the armed struggle that will transform Rhodesia into Zimbabwe gradually invade Tessa-s daily life, the adults in her world remain oddly dismissive, even as civil war becomes an inescapable reality. Tessa comes to realise that white dominated Africa belongs in the past; her optimism for the inevitable political change is shocking to a generation desperate to preserve what it has. But amid the chaos of
