Krotoa, a feisty, bright, 11-year-old girl is removed from her close-knit Khoi tribe to serve Jan van Riebeeck, her uncle’s trading partner and the first Governor of the Cape Colony. She is brought into the first Fort established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652. There she grows into a visionary young woman who assimilates the Dutch language and culture so well that she rises to become an influential translator but ends up being rejected by her own people as she tries to bridge the gap between the two cultures about to collide.

François van Heerden, a mid-40s Afrikaans family man, has become devoid of any care or concern for his own measure of happiness, and so convinced of his ill-fated existence, that he is wholly unprepared when a chance encounter unravels his clean, controlled life.