Other editions of book Out of Shadows

Twelve-year-old Robert Jacklin comes face-to-face with bigotry, racism, and brutality when he is uprooted from England and moves to Zimbabwe with his family. Robert is enrolled in one of the country's most elite boys' boarding schools. Newly integrated, the school is a microcosm of the horrible problems faced by the struggling new country in the wake of a bloody civil war. The white boys want their old country back and torment the black Africans. Robert must make careful alliances. His decision to join the ranks of the more powerful white boys has a devastating effect on his conscience and emerging manhood.

'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?' Zimbabwe, 1980s. The fighting has stopped, independence has been won and Robert Mugabe has come to power offering the end of the Old Way and promising hope for black Africans.For Robert Jacklin, it’s all new: new continent, new country, new school. And very quickly he learns that for some of his white classmates, the sound of guns is still loud, and their battles rage on.Boys like Ivan. Clever, cunning Ivan.He wants things back to how they were, and he’s taking his fight to the very top.Winner of the Costa, the UKLA and the Branford Boase Awards

Twelve-year-old Robert Jacklin comes face-to-face with bigotry, racism, and brutality when he is uprooted from England and moves to Zimbabwe with his family. Robert is enrolled in one of the country’s most elite boys’ boarding schools. Newly integrated, the school is a microcosm of the horrible problems faced by the struggling new country in the wake of a bloody civil war. The white boys want their old country back and torment the black Africans. Robert must make careful alliances. His decision to join the ranks of the more powerful white boys has a devastating effect on his conscience and emerging manhood.

Twelve-year-old Robert Jacklin comes face-to-face with bigotry, racism, and brutality when he is uprooted from England and moves to Zimbabwe with his family. Robert is enrolled in one of the country’s most elite boys’ boarding schools. Newly integrated, the school is a microcosm of the horrible problems faced by the struggling new country in the wake of a bloody civil war. The white boys want their old country back and torment the black Africans. Robert must make careful alliances. His decision to join the ranks of the more powerful white boys has a devastating effect on his conscience and emerging manhood.

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 — in hindsight, should Jacklin have killed Ivan or let Ivan kill Robert Mugabe?