The story of a boy growing up in the innocence and the violence of Colonial Africa.From childhood he had learnt the ways of Africa and of it’s history, yet he was also a product of his own time and place and of his own distinct English culture. He grew to understand that there are few absolutes among people and societies. Only the Bush is pure in it’s pitiless logic, in its stark contrast between life and death.

His experiences shape and change him as he grows by stages from boyhood through youth to young manhood, his rites of passage set against a background of love, hate, and pitiless civil war."

This is a story about a largely forgotten people living out their lives geographically isolated from their parent culture, separated by thousands of miles from the lands whence their ancestors had come.  These people were the successors of Alexander the Great and his followers, at the furthermost tip of his Empire, in modern Afghanistan, then called Bactria,  and the vast lands surrounding  it. Their early centuries are well documented, their exploits known."