Dinah & her sister Lisa are growing up in 1950s South Africa where racial laws are tightening They are two little girls from a dissenting liberal family Big sister Lisa is strong & sensible while Dinah is weedy & arty At school the sadistic Mrs Vaughan-Jones is providing instruction in mental arithmetic & racial prejudice & then there's the puzzle of lunch break ' Would you rather have a native girl or a koelie to make your sandwiches?' a first-year classmate asks But Dinah doesn't know the answer because it's her dad who makes her sandwiches As the apparatus of repression rolls on Dinah finds her own way As we follow her journey through childhood & adolescence we enter into one of the darker passages of twentieth-century history