
Along the shores of the Eastern Cape, a disturbing story builds, that will have devastating effects on a settled life in Johannesburg.
A city in transition, Johannesburg is still gripped by a slightly faded euphoria, yet teeters on the edge of disenchantment. Megan returns from a sojourn in London to find her cousin Francesca using the normality of her life to obscure the dark imprint left by her past. Megan has little time for that though. She has discovered Johannesburg, in all its larger-than-life aspects.
Her life, and that of Francesca, seem to absorb some of the wild extremes of this vivid city. Megan meets it all head-on, while Francesca struggles to deal with a difficult marriage that cannot quite transcend the fears and freneticism of a new society, and a slightly impaired child.
In a time when people party to forget, and yet never quite let go, both Megan and Francesca will be dragged headlong into remembering before they are able to understand forgiveness.
This is a story of hope and recovery, told with the lyricism Jo-Anne Richards showed in The Innocence of Roast Chicken. The city is poetically dealt with and her flawed, but sympathetic characters wrestle with issues that are both uniquely South African and common to all people.