What happens to Chris and Ruthie comes naturally to teenagers: they fall in love, obsessively. But it isn't natural that their love can only survive in secrecy, being against the wishes, even beyond the imagination, of their parents. And above all being illegal. At home Chris half loves, half fears his taciturn father, who never speaks of his important work for the Government. As Chris's world opens up he learns about his father's job as head of the province's Race Classification Office, whose every decision can make or break somebody's life in the 1970s South Africa. In this moving rites-of-passage story set in extraordinary circumstances, a coloured girl and white boy head for devastating consequences as their vulnerable lives hurtle down a collision course with the pitiless laws of society and the implacable resolve of his father.