A young physical therapist living in the cold and bleak of northern Canada longs for a new life, and so she goes to work in South Africa. The novel centres around the new life Jayne finds. At first her life centres around the white and black hospitals where she works and her new boyfriend. But soon she is sucked into the revolutionary ferment of Soweto in the 1970s and the brutal reactionary violence of the apartheid regime. She has escaped boredom - but she is in a frightening world, not knowing friend from enemy.