For 250 years the Bryan Rostron’s family spread across the globe, helping to expand the British Empire and paint the map red. This is a personal reckoning with that dubious legacy, echoing down to the present in South Africa.

It begins with the ‘discovery’ of Tahiti in 1767 by an ancestor, from whose log book Rostron reveals that his sailors were exchanging the ship’s nails for sex with Tahitian maidens so that HMS Dolphin began, literally, to fall apart.

After the Anglo-Boer war, having emigrated to South Africa, one grandfather became editor of the Sunday Times, voicing racist opinions, and later of the Rand Daily Mail, at that time a voice of the Randlords. Ironically, his other grandfather worked for the Communist Party and printed revolutionary pamphlets for the violent 1922 Rand Revolt. In a bizarre twist, Rostron’s father managed the 1936 South African boxing team at the Berlin Olympics, where from under his nose their star boxer was recruited by the Nazis.

Uncovering family secrets and mistaken myths, Rostron offers a unique insight into modern-day South Africa’s colonial past.

Unassuming archivist Macaulay Vogel examines a recently discovered cache of old police archives, when all of a sudden he comes upon a surveillance file about himself. It's a terrible shock: he doesn't recognise this person at all. Who is the youthful Macaulay Vogel in these reports? As Vogel sets out to discover who he once was - and now is, a series of dramatically unintended events is ignited. Vogel soon discovers no one wants the past raked up anymore. He seeks out old friends: a lover; former comrades; the struggle lawyer turned corporate lawyer; even their nemesis, Boschard, the eerie former security policeman. Vogel's search for the truth is paralleled by the excavation of a mysterious accumulation of bones in the centre of Cape Town. Is this a secret slave burial pit? The site becomes an impassioned battle ground and the rising social and racial tensions threaten to spill over into violence. Unwillingly, Vogel is sucked into mediating between two former comrades, now bitter rivals. Macaulay Vogel, however, is also haunted by his own secrets: above all, the mysterious Marda. For whom does he buy all those extravagant bouquets of flowers? The twin strands of the files and the bones finally converge, threatening to crush Vogel.

When Robert McBride was sentenced to death, he turned to the public gallery in court and said: ‘Freedom is just around the corner. I am leaving you at the corner – and you must take that corner to find freedom on the other side.’ As the guard moved in, he raised his fist and shouted: ‘The struggle continues till Babylon falls!’

It was 1987: the time of ‘total onslaught’. The trial of the MK unit that planted the Magoo's bomb on the Durban beachfront dominated the news but few knew the real facts of the brave young people who brought the armed struggle to KwaZulu-Natal.

This is the remarkable story of McBride and his comrades: the substation sabotage spree, rescuing a compatriot from hospital and smuggling him to Botswana, the devastating Why Not and Magoo's car bomb that killed three women, the dramatic trial and McBride’s 1 463 days on Death Row.

Now updated to include McBride’s controversial life after the end of apartheid, this is a thrilling tale of a young South African’s incredible courage, loyalty between friends and falling in love across the race barrier. Today, the struggle continues as McBride fights against corruption and state capture.