Sam Jameson was eight years old when his father George died in shocking circumstances. He decides, some forty years later, to finally open the box of his father's papers which his mother had passed on to him, and he left sealed for two decades. In trying to piece together a picture of his unknown father, Sam discovers a troubled, doomed, but extraordinary man - and an extraordinary story. George was a Native Commissioner in the old South Africa, deeply unsure of the morality of his work, but unable to escape it. The backdrop is the lush and harsh landscape of South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, in the early years of apartheid ...