"Rebecca meets Fatima Farheen Mirza in this sweeping, gorgeously atmospheric novel about a ruined mansion by the sea, and a young girl who unearths the true story of the tragedy that happened there a hundred years ago. Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Now, nearly a century since it was built, it stands in ruins--a boardinghouse for misfits, where people come to forget or be forgotten. Seeking a new home after a painful...

The story of an affluent white South African family during apartheid. Its narrator is the son of an Afrikaner general and he describes his growing disillusion with the cruelty and arrogance of the whites. Set in the 1970s, the novel follows him from boyhood to soldiering in Angola, fighting the blacks.