Kate is a white South African with an attitude. While her human-rights lawyer husband Joe is starry-eyed about the unfolding of the new South Africa, she relentlessly mocks it. In uncovering the mystery of why Kate is as she is, the story shifts between two worlds: the rural idyll of her grandparents' chicken farm in 1966, and Johannesburg in 1989 . . . this book has pace and tension - shot through with the terrible beauty of the South African landscape and the efforts of a child to stave off a gathering evil.
