Rosa era una niña cuando su padre, Lionel Burger, fue condenado a cadena perpetua por promover la revolución en Sudáfrica. A partir de entonces, empezará un camino que la llevará a replantearse lo que realmente significa ser la hija de Burger.
La única idea que Mehring, un industrial cincuentón y aún atractivo para las mujeres, tiene por clara en su vida es la que debe conservar a toda costa su modo de vida.
Who picked up whom? Is the pickup the illegal immigrant desperate to evade deportation to his impoverished desert country? Or is the pickup the powerful businessman''s daughter trying to escape a privileged background she despises? When Julie Summers'' car breaks down in the sleazy street where she meets her Retro-Sixties friends, a young Arab garage mechanic emerges from beneath the chassis of a vehicle to aid her. Out of this meeting develops an extraordinary story of unpredictable and relentless emotions that turn on its head each one''s notions of the other. No action by either is what the other expects. She insists, against his know-how of the rules of survival, on leaving the country with him when he is deported. The love affair becomes a marriage - that state she regards as a social convention appropriate to her father''s set - but decreed by her ''grease-monkey'' (as her friends privately dub him) in order to present her respectably to his family.In the Arab village, while he is dedicated to escaping, again to what he believes is a fulfilling life in Western-style countries, she is drawn by a counter-magnet of new affinities in his close family and the omnipresence of the desert.
James Bray, an English colonial administrator who was expelled from a central African nation for siding with its black nationalist leaders, is invited back ten years later to join in the country's independence celebrations. As he witnesses the factionalism and violence that erupt as revolutionary ideals are subverted by ambition and greed, Bray is once again forced to choose sides, a choice that becomes both his triumph and his undoing.
Esta selección de relatos realizada por la propia autora, personalidad activa en la lucha antiapartheid, es reflejo vivo de la evolución de las actitudes sociales en África.
