Tessa Harmand is nine years old when a humiliating experience forever alters her naïve 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 a country fighting itself to reforge its identity, can Tessa hold on to what’s most important?