Mark Behr describes the Afrikaner mentality in apartheid South Africa as seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy called Marnus, the son of an Army General.

In 2017, the Afrikaans novel was adapted for the stage by the theatre company Theatrerocket, featuring Gideon Lombard in this solo production, directed by Lara Bye.

Marnus Erasmus is an eleven-year-old boy who, with his family, lives in Cape Town, South Africa in the early seventies.

Now Marnus' father thinks that the black people are going to destroy everything that they built up and that the white population has to prevent this by keeping the native Africans under control.

Marnus' older sister Ilse, an intelligent and talented girl, under the influence of a stay in the Netherlands, but also of an aunt living in London, gradually begins to become more and more sceptic of her father's beliefs.

In specially interspersed italicized sections of the novel set in the late 1980s, Marnus is presented to be a soldier in the South African Border War, in which he is apparently killed.