When the Tree is Dry (ePub)

It's 2008, and Zimbabwe is reeling from biting poverty and repression. With hyperinflation, workers' salaries have devalued to nothing by the time they draw the money from the bank, and unemployment soars as companies close. Hunger has created a nation desperate for change, but the cutthroat clique in government is equally desperate to cling to power. They are afraid of losing their ill-gotten fortunes and being made to pay for past crimes against humanity.

London-based Claire is an amateur reporter. When her marriage breaks up and her teenage daughter leaves home, all Claire has left is burning ambition. She is determined to write articles that make the world stand up and take notice of injustice and oppression, and Zimbabwe's upcoming election is the perfect opportunity to prove she is capable of making a difference.

Working undercover, she finds herself pitted against a government determined to conceal human rights abuses at all costs. She becomes increasingly entangled in the situation she's supposed to be reporting as she ventures into no-go areas where life is expendable.

Sekai, a young mother living in a remote village, has only one concern: the wellbeing of her family. But her husband's politics place her in the path of the government's vicious purge of the opposition party. Amidst a furore of beating, burning and rape, she finds an unexpected inner strength as she fights to keep her family together.

Florence is no stranger to the brutality of the Zimbabwean government. Driven from her home to hide as an illegal immigrant in England, she longs for democracy in her own country. When she returns to Zimbabwe as a political activist, she must confront her fears while caring for an ever-increasing tide of refugees hiding in a lice-ridden building.

In an epic tale of three women caught in a country's plunge towards anarchy and genocide, they not only struggle for individual survival, but together they prove that ordinary people can influence a nation's destiny.