In 1972, when Alexandra Fuller was two years old, her parents finally abandoned their English life and returned to what was then Southern Rhodesia and to the beginning of a civil war. By the time she was eight, the war was in full swing.

Her parents veered from being determined farmers to being blind drunk, whilst Alexandra and her sister, the only survivors of five children, alternately take up target practice and sing Rod Stewart songs from sun bleached rocks. This memoir is about living through a civil war; it is about losing children and losing that war, and realising that the side you have been fighting for may well be the wrong one.