South Africa, 2004; Jerusalem (half Muslim, half Jew) is a young student with poetic leanings. Zero, his buccaneering father, will no longer fund his ephemeral lifestyle. So he is sent away from the city to Hermanus to learn to stand on his own two feet by selling ethnic curios to tourists. During his forced exile he takes on a Tanzanian refugee boy as his fellow trader and falls for the beautiful yet elusive Lotte. At the same time Jabulani, a Zimbabwean teacher, loses his job for making a satirical remark about Mugabe and heads south in a bid to find a life beyond the chaos of Zimbabwe. Across the border he is captured and held as a slave worker on a marijuana farm, but escapes, and heads towards the Cape where his life will intersect with Jeru’s. The characters work out their intertwining destinies against a landscape of breathtaking natural beauty and a backdrop of casual violence and xenophobia. It’s a world one will not easily forget; its scents and colours and energetic characters will linger long in readers’ imaginations.