With relish and consummate skill, Pauline Melville conjures vivid pictures of savannah, forest and city life in South America where love is often trumped by disaster. Unforgettable characters illuminate theme and plot; Sonny, the strange, beautiful and isolate son of Beatrice and Danny, the brother and sister who have a passionate affair at the time of the solar eclipse in 1919; Father Napier, the sandy-haired evangelist whom the Indians perceive as a giant grasshopper; Chofy McKinnon the modern Indian, torn between savannah life and urban future. This is a novel which embraces nearly a century, large in scope but intimate as a whisper, where laughter is never far from the scene of tragedy; a parable of miscegenation and racial exclusiveness, of nature defying culture and of the eternally rebellious nature of love.