In the spring of 1999, in the beautiful hills of the Kwa-Zulu Natal midlands, a young white farmer is shot dead on the dirt road running from his father’s farmhouse to his irrigation fields. The murder is the work of assassins rather than robbers; a single shot behind the ear, nothing but his gun stolen, no forensic evidence like spent cartridges or fingerprints left at the scene. Journalist Jonny Steinberg travels to the midlands to investigate.

Local black workers say the young white man had it coming. The dead man’s father says the machinery of a political conspiracy has been set into motion, that he and his neighbours are being pushed off their land. Initially thinking that he is to write about an event in the recent past, Steinberg finds that much of the story lies in the immediate future. He has stumbled upon a festering frontier battle, the combatants groping hungrily for the whispers and lies that drift in from the other side.

Right from the beginning, it is clear that the young white man is not the only one who will die on that frontier, and that the story of his and other deaths will illuminate a great deal about the early days of post-apartheid South Africa.

Jonny Steinberg is a journalist and a scriptwriter. In the mid-1990s he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at Oxford University where he graduated with a doctorate in political theory. He returned to South Africa in 1998 and worked for Business Day, writing on the constitutional court and the police. He left Business Day to write Midlands, which he did while based at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg. Steinberg is currently working on his second book.