The Snake in the Signal Box

‘He marvelled at their sense of balance, their beautiful dark skin, their erect bodies and their smiles’

‘We must never forget how our women and children died in the British concentration camps’

‘Are you aware that in 1913 all Asiatic people were classified as Undesirables?’

‘Prue turned and kissed him, her mouth soft and warm, saying, “Trams are romantic things, aren’t they.”

In 1919, among indentured Indians, defeated Zulus and Boers still smarting from a Second Boer War defeat and the suppression of another rebellion in 1914, Donald Kirkwood, a Scottish ex-soldier, starts a remote Zululand cotton farm. With little knowledge of agriculture, he and his settler neighbours must cope with malaria, sleeping sickness, racial tensions and Spanish Flu.

As the influences of Eugenics, Nationalism and Bolshevism seep into ex-colonial society he attends an unsettling séance in Durban and meets a pretty librarian. This first novel in the Kirkwood trilogy reflects with wit and accuracy the milieu of the years immediately after the First World War in Natal and the enchantment of falling in love.