As the daughter of white Communists growing up in South Africa, Gillian Slovo had to share her parents with the fight against apartheid. Given the amount of time they spent on the run, in hiding, or in jail, she and her two sisters spent much of their childhood apart from their parents. While proud of their lifelong dedication to a noble cause (her father lived long enough to serve briefly in the Mandela Cabinet; her mother was killed in 1982 by government security forces), the author remains troubled by the toll it took on her family. The tension between familial responsibility and political commitment forms the defining motif of her striking memoir.
