Cara and Grace are two young women. Cara is a medical doctor who has an exciting career, a loving marriage and a beautiful six-month-old son, Noah. Grace is a teenage girl – young, fit and talented, embarking on all that life has to offer her.

When each one of them is devastated by personal tragedy, neither one knows how to rebuild their own life. But when Grace has the idea, inspired by the Reach For A Dream Foundation, to cycle across South Africa from Durban back to her home city of Cape Town, Cara appears to be the most qualified companion for her.

‘Miles to Go’ is a story about the journey that these companions take – a journey of many physical miles but also one that is filled with just as many emotional milestones as they embark on their journey back to wholeness. It is filled with the struggles and fears, tears and more than a little laughter of two young women who are trying to overcome their loss and find their way back to life, in defiance of the hands that they have been dealt.

Five very different women... Cape Town is home to each one of them. Surrounded by its mountains and seas, but also by the struggles and difficulties of a young post-transformation country, each one lives out her separate life. Then fate begins to intertwine their lives through a series of circumstances...

Faith, who has taken on a job as part-time receptionist in Bethany’s practice, is physically abused by her manipulative and controlling husband. Between Bethany and Rafiqah, the detective who investigates her case, they manage to persuade her to prosecute him and this involves the legal help of Lindiwe, the public prosecutor. But Lindiwe’s nightmare past means that her involvement in cases of abuse can never be totally objective. Ayesha, who teaches Bethany’s young daughter notices subtle changes in the little girl’s behaviour and, together with Faith, makes a shocking discovery.

The Silence of the Shadows is a novel about the strength and frailty in each of us, the recognition that at different times we can be either the helper or the helped and that it is totally acceptable to be both.

For Hannah, born from Nandi, and adopted by Patrick and Fiona, it is not so easy to work out who she really is. Is she the privileged daughter of an upper middle class British couple or is she an unwanted South African child who needed an adoptive family? How can she reconcile these two personas, especially when she looks so different from her adoptive parents?

In her questioning mind, she appears to be not white enough for Britain, but not black enough for Africa. As she grows older, her identity issues become greater until they threaten to engulf her.

Her parents, wanting to be faithful to a promise they made to her birth mother, but also desperately frightened of losing their child to her birth heritage, are not forthcoming when it comes to answering her questions. This makes her feel she can’t trust them and alienates her further. It is only when she re-establishes a connection with the country of her birth that Hannah starts to work through the issues that trouble her in her search to find the peace that appears to be so elusive.