This is a hard country. Underlying even the rich veldt of the plateau, with its accentuated colours and over-brilliant skies, is a bedrock that has broken hearts, wills, marriages and lives. Despite its huge spaces, it instills an urge for withdrawal. Its tribes gather within their kraals against nocturnal predators and invasion by other tribes. And the last arrivals, the most powerful tribe of all, has built the biggest and grandest kraals to see them through the eternity of their tenure here. Seven people-four of them Afrikaner and three black-meet in the wastelands south of the Mozambique border to learn of the genocide hatched in South African laboratories. But there is so much conflict between them that they may never agree on the one chance to reveal those plans to the world at large.
Peter Moss draws upon his experience of Tongaland to conceive what might have been had the world known earlier of the human rights abuses that only came to light in the course of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. River in Search of a Sea is his fifth novel.
