Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA

South Africa features heavily in Sundowners as home to two of the novel's leading characters, Rianne and Riitho, although they're from opposite sides of the country's racial divide. Unusually, however, both are born into privilege – Rianne into great wealth and Riitho into a family with a long and important political lineage. They are both sent to boarding school in England, where they first meet, although – predictably – they loathe each other. It is only much later that they discover a shared passion for this endlessly fascinating and challenging part of the world.

Extract from sundowners:

     To Riitho, listening with half an ear to the snatches of conversation, the weeks passed in a blur. From Dar they flew across the country, bearing south-west, towards Namibia. Riitho looked out of the window of the private 747 loaned to them by Kenneth Kaunda, the Zambian president, and watched his country unfold, mile after mile. The pilot, the first black commercial pilot any of the men had ever seen, pointed out the landmarks as they crossed the country. The men in the plane fell silent as they looked on the territory they had spent years preparing soldiers to infiltrate, many of them from maps only with no real memory of the terrain – they had been in exile too long. Now they looked on it for real. They headed across the northern tip of the country, across Pietersburg in the northern Transvaal, across the southern tip of Botswana, Gaborone, the capital and then across the desert, the Kalahari. They could see the national parks and game reserves, burst of green in the dry, reddened land...