Young David Morgan, gifted heir apparent to a South African fortune, rebels against the boardroom future mapped out for him with sickening predictability by his family. Drawn to the sky as though to his natural element, he trains to become a brilliant jet pilot and, fleeing from his home and all it stands for, sets out to make his own life.

But after meeting Debra, an attractive young Israeli writer and university lecturer, once more free choice seems his no longer. Drawn to Jerusalem to find her, he is straightway plunged into Israel's nerve-snapping struggle for survival.

Mirage pilots as skilled as he are at a premium, and both memories of his own mother and his growing passion for Debra make involvement with this new country's cause inescapable.

But excitement and exhilaration are checked by a violent reality, as the war which has drawn David and Debra so close, threatens to tear them apart.

The story of David's anguished fight to preserve their love from the destruction and mutilation of war, and replant it in the relative  if not wholly unbroken  peace of the remote South African wilds, ensures this novel a place among the Wilbur Smith greats. It is a haunting and irresistible read.