Ella has a difficult relationship with her domineering father, and with apartheid South Africa, the troubled country in which she lives. Whilst seeking political refuge in Europe Ella makes an unexpected discovery that forces her to confront both her father's ghosts and the shape of her own future. In the Netherlands, the country of his birth, her father, Ella finds, never officially recognized her existence. I have rarely read a book this transformational or darkly inspiring. A landmark in the literature of women's experience. This is a harrowing but poetically told account of a young girl's emotional abuse and in a sense, enslavement, at the hands of two badly damaged parents, set hauntingly in the context of apartheid era South Africa.' Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth
