Late at night Ella watches her elderly father on the veranda, raging at the African sky. Caught between her mother's mysterious grief and her father's shattering wartime experiences, between the Holland of their past and apartheid South Africa, Ella fights hard to make it through her childhood in one piece. Her one enchantment is her forbidden love for the teenage gardener, Phineas. Years later, as an activist seeking political refuge in the Netherlands, Ella discovers her father never registered her birth. Now she must confront her father's ghosts, and create a new future for herself.