We don't meet the sisters, Thenjiwe and Nonceba, until thirty pages into the novel, and in many ways the nation, not the sisters, is the story's main character. In those first thirty pages, Vera takes us on a meandering tour of the city of Bulawayo, painstakingly mapping out street names and stores, most of which are English-sounding. From there we travel to the nearby township of Kezi, a sleepy village where life centers around the Thandabantu general store and visits from the Bulawayo bus, and westernization is an arm's length away. "Whenever the Kwakhe River is full, the bus fails to cross the bridge; it lags, and people have to spend a day and maybe half a night waiting on the other side, nestling their treasured wares gathered from the city, while listening to the river sulk. The bridge becomes covered entirely, as if it had never been there."

Vera's poetic descriptions establish a distinct sense of place, while the sense of time and the presence of people are initially very dreamy and impressionistic, a wash. The unhurried pace at which she approaches the part of the novel that can be described as having a conventional plot recalls the work of Virginia Woolf, but might be frustrating to impatient western readers, accustomed to training their interest on individuals and "strong" storylines.

Eventually, we meet the first of the sisters, Thenjiwe, when she takes a lover from out of town and he ends up living with her in Kezi for several months. Vera portrays the relationship with close attention to the subtle ebb and flow of their emotions and memories during conversations, silences and sleep, again recalling Virginia Woolf.

Soon after the affair, a post-independence war erupts and Thejiwe meets a violent death, while her beloved sister Nonceba is brutally raped and injured. This portion of the novel is extremely difficult to read, because the author has so convincingly brought the horrors or war to life. But while Nonceba endures the worst of what a man is capable of inflicting upon a woman, she is later the recipient of an extraordinary act of kindness. In the physical and psychological aftermath of her trials, the slowly recovering Nonceba is sought out by Thenjiwe's former lover, and she must decide whether or not to trust him.

"In a war," says Vera, "you discard names like old resemblances, like handkerchiefs torn, leave them behind like tributaries dried." As the novel progresses, it too changes, leaving behind the flowing, abundant style of its opening pages and becoming more western: more direct, more linear, more focused on the individual and on a distinct storyline, and less poetic.

-- Christine Leahy