Borderline

A blood-stained letter among her deceased ex-husband’s belongings rips open Theresa’s world. For years she has turned her back on Theo, a man who spent the last two decades of his life institutionalised, and on their shared past in a country where teenage boys were conscripted in the Seventies to fight a foreign war that those back home knew little about. Realising that the letter entrusted to Theo was written by a dying Cuban soldier and addressed to the soldier’s newborn child – who, if still alive, should be forty years old – Theresa heads for Cuba: to find the soldier’s child, to deliver the letter, to atone for Theo. In sultry, run-down Cuba, amid its picturesque 1950s cars and the fragrant smoke of its cigars, Theresa’s search connects her intimately with those branded ‘the enemy’ in Angola as she begins to unravel what growing up in the South Africa of that time really meant.