This is a story of twin boys – identical in appearance but in nothing else. Ashraf is all rage and action – a lover of the real. Firoze is a dreamer and reader - a lover of the ideal. The Dawood family is from Muslim Fordsburg. The father (formally at least) is a merchant and the mother a part-time philosophy lecturer at Wits. Their uncle, known universally as Ten-Per-Cent, lives in the house and shares the ginger-beer factory business with his brother. The story begins in Johannesburg but ends in the US. Ashraf is jailed in Fort Dix Prison in Texas, and Firoze is just settling in New York with his new young wife. Among the cast of characters are Mohammed Atta (of 9/11 notoriety), George Bush, a Pakistani Brigadier in Peshawar, a host of lawyers and assorted crooks of one kind or another, plus various Korean massage parlour girls. Firoze is the narrator and he tells the story while in prison – before finally tricking Ashraf into changing places. The story offers itself as an unconventional family memoir that tells the story of the fortunes of a family of crooks – the green-eyed thieves. The mother is an accomplished shoplifter; the father a master of all forms of theft – including all the suits of the Aga Khan who happened to be the same size as Dawood senior. Firoze, the sophisticated dreamer, is not much good at thieving but Ashraf lives for little else.

Eleven-year-old Nolitye lives in Phola, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, where children have been mysteriously disappearing. Her best friends are Bheki - overweight and timid - and bespectacled Four Eyes, who leaves the Spoilers, a gang under the leadership of Rotten Nellie. At first, the story centres on the threesome's efforts to survive victimisation at the hands of Four Eyes' former gang. But when Nolitye picks up a magic stone, the intrigue shifts to a magical realm that co-exists with ours. It soon becomes clear that Nolitye, who has always taken comfort in her granny's words, "you mess with a woman, you mess with a rock", is the new seeker for the five pieces of the magic stone which, when restored, will heal communities and bring them together again. In a dream, Nolitye learns that her father, once a healer and believed to have died in a mining accident, is being held captive in the underworld and that the woman whom she believes to be her mother is really a witch in the service of Ncitjana, the Evil One. Nolitye then embarks on a quest to find the missing pieces of the stone and to rescue her parents.