Out of Shadows

A compelling, thought-provoking novel about race, bullying and the need to belong, set in Africa.

If I stood you in front of a man, pressed a gun into your palm and told you to squeeze the trigger, would you do it?
No, Sir, No way!
What if I then told you we'd gone back in time and his name was Adolf Hitler?
Would you do it then?

Set in Zimbabwe in the 1980s, just after the war for independence, a young English boy, Jacklin, is torn between his black friends at school and his sympathy for the colonial whites after witnessing the compulsory land seizures by Robert Mugabe's government.

But with an imminent visit by Robert Mugabe to the school, Jacklin realizes that Ivan, his white supremacist schoolmate, plans to assassinate the black leader. The novel leaves us with the moral dilemma â in hindsight, should Jacklin have killed Ivan or let Ivan kill Robert Mugabe?

JASON WALLACE lived in Zimbabwe and attended a boarding school there in the aftermath of the war for independence. Out of Shadows is his debut novel.