Published in 1987 (by Virago in London), it was a collection of inter-related short stories, set during the Apartheid era and partly autobiographical, the central character being a young Coloured woman growing up in South Africa,[1] speaking English in an Afrikaans-speaking community in Namaqualand, attending the University of the Western Cape, leaving for England, and authoring a collection of short stories.

[2] As Rob Gaylard notes, "Central to Wicomb's collection of stories is the question of identity, and intimately bound up with this are the polarities of home and exile.

The book was translated into Italian by Maria Teresa Carbone as Cenere Sulla Mia Manica (Rome: Edizioni Lavoro, 1993), with an Introduction by Dorothy Driver, who suggests that Wicomb's stories are without precedent, that no one previously had written from the particular perspective a woman brought up "Coloured" in South Africa.

"[5] Describing the book as "superb", Bharati Mukherjee wrote in her New York Times review: "Ms. Wicomb's subject isn't – as American readers might expect - simple apartheid.

In this acceptance of apartheid and the desire to see beyond it, Ms. Wicomb follows Faulkner and certainly echoes her black countryman Njabulo Ndebele, who (in his recent collection, Fools and Other Stories) wrote: 'Our literature ought to seek to move away from an easy preoccupation with demonstrating the obvious existence of oppression.