Mol Benade lives with her family - Treppie, Pop, and son Lambert - in a rotting government house, the only thing they have other than decaying appliances that break as soon as they're fixed, remembrances of a happy past that never really existed, and each other, a Faulknerian bond of intimacy that ranges from sympathetic to cruel, heartfelt to violently incestuous. In the months preceding South Africa's first free election in 1994, a secret will come to light that threatens to disintegrate and alter the bonds between this deranged quartet forever.