When a charismatic stranger arrives on her family’s farm, twelve-year-old Stella is sure he has come to heal her broken family. And at first, he does; her father stays sober, and her mother begins to laugh again. But Stella soon realizes that the man with the silver cross has not come to save them. In a desperate effort to save what little remains, she tells her story of “terrible trouble” to a hungry tabloid journalist.

Filled with love and violence, shame and devotion, this evocative novel treads through post-apartheid South Africa, hand in hand with a child who has seen too much.