I had expected from the title and the dust jacket blurb that this book would be about the community of South Africans exiled, either voluntarily or required, because of their political views. Actually the South Africans themselves are almost irrelevant, or rather their national origin is; the book would have worked just as well by substituting any other repressive regime for “South Africa”. So if you’re looking for the particulars of the South African experience, this book isn’t it. It is really about a Jewish emigre who go to ut of Germany ahead of the concentration camps, and the author adds some clever twists so that the book and plot are not obvious recitations of Nazi-era issues. It would be a spoiler to say much more bout the plot itself. As a book about South Africa you would be disappointed, but it is a very good read and introduces some of the overall challenges of being an emigre. It’s not as easy as it sounds living in a land where everyone is fat. dumb and happy when you’d really rather be in the place you think of as home, even if it can’t stand you any more.