Cyril James is a Coloured man, born of a hardworking, loving Coloured mother and an Indian father, who physically abused the small James (so slight, he was nicknamed "Feathers"), whenever he was drunk. His mother was unable to marry the father of her three children, because of his family's bigotry towards Coloureds. The little family were forced to live under the roof of his family and suffer their antagonism and cruelty. Young James and his elder sister, Miriam, later witness a terrible murder that is to send their lives into a downward spiral. In his late teens, James leaves Durban to go to Cape Town to seek his fortune at sea, but bad luck, his predilection for choosing the wrong friends, and the imbibing of alcohol, an endemic problem among the poverty-stricken Coloureds, were to drag the young James down. Caught up in the underbelly of the city, he has to face hardship, dangers, prison and near death. Telling of the extreme hardships suffered by the Coloureds during the brutal apartheid years, it is not a political book, but a very human and poignant tale of one man's life. Beautifully descriptive, James has richly evoked the period and wields an enthralling tale.
