Pamela Jooste Knihy

When Frieda first met Min, with her golden hair and ivory bones, what struck her most was that Min was wearing a pair of African sandals, the sort made out of old car tyres. She was a silent, unhappy girl, dumped on Frieda's exuberant family in Johannesburg for the summer of 1964 so that her mother could go off with her new husband. In a way, Min and Frieda were both outsiders - Min, raised in the bush by her idealistic doctor father, and Frieda, daughter of a poor Jewish saxophone player who lived almost on top of a native neighborhood. The two girls, thrown together - the 'white kaffir' and the poor Jewish girl - formed a strange but loyal friendship, a friendship that was to last even through the terrible years of oppression and betrayal during the time of South Africa under Apartheid.

'My name is Lily Daniels and I live in The Valley, in an old house at the top of a hill with a loquat tree in the garden. As Lily's beautiful but angry mother returns to Cape Town, determined to fight for justice for her family, so the story of Lily's past - and future - erupts.

Der alte Buschmann Bastiaan weiht den zwölfjährigen Conrad in die Geheimnisse der Wildnis ein. Und die alten afrikanischen Mythen, die der Buschmann dem Jungen erzählt, vermitteln ihm Weisheiten, die ihn sein ganzes Leben lang begleiten werden. Conrad bewahrt sie in seinem Herzen, während seine Familie zu zerreißen droht: Sein Vater, ein einflussreicher weißer Senator des Apartheidregimes, behandelt Conrads Schwester Beeky und seine Frau mit kalter Gleichgültigkeit. Während sich Beeky immer stärker gegen den Vater und das von ihm vertretene System auflehnt, scheint sich Conrad zunächst den Wünschen seines Vaters zu fügen.