The novel is historical fiction set in the early 1950s during the dark Apartheid era, in a small rural town in South Africa, with flashbacks to the battle fields of the Second World War in North Africa. Two girls constantly encounter each other on the farm: Ada, is the only daughter of the farm owner, Jonah Courtnay and his war time bride Johelia.
Nicky is a young girl of mixed descent, and daughter of the help on the farm. The harshness of those times, tests this relationship further, when the homestead is raided by the brutal, vengeful policeman, Koos. At the centre of the novel is the Courtnay farm, where Jonah and his war bride Johelia, live with their only daughter Ada and her resentful grandmother. The passive resistance of the people during the Defiance Campaign to the unjust laws of Apartheid threatens the harvesting of the ripe apples waiting to be picked. The workers who usually walk five kilometres from the Black people's township to the farm don't arrive to work. However, Nicky and her mother Rosie circumvent the barricades and join the loyal workers and friends of the Courtnays who gather to save the produce. Family bonds are tested, friendships strengthened while others are fractured and even broken as Johelia and Jonah decide to build a school for the local Black children on their property. When Johelia forms a choir for the children, ethnic music, jazz, song and dance fill the farm and the hardships of their lives under racist laws are momentarily forgotten. Interwoven in the plot are the secrets that Jonah keeps hidden within himself and his diary of his time serving during the Second World War. Ada is determined to unravel the story. Jonah finds a friend and sympathetic listener in the Australian Dr Bainton who too served in North Africa. They lament the treatment of the unrecognised bravery of the Indigenous soldiers of South Africa and Australia. They share their war time experiences of blinding sandstorms, relentless bombardment and fierce fighting at famous battles including Tobruk. The final secret, of Jonah's last battle at El Alamein, which has impacted so greatly on the family since the war, is revealed as they sit around the kitchen table. By the light of the candle, on a dark night, Jonah reads from his diary until there is no more to be said.
