Seven people-four of them Afrikaner and three black-meet in the wastelands south of the Mozambique border to learn of the genocide hatched in South African laboratories. But there is so much conflict between them that they may never agree on the one chance to reveal those plans to the world at large.

Peter Moss draws upon his experience of Tongaland to conceive what might have been had the world known earlier of the human rights abuses that only came to light in the course of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. River in Search of a Sea is his fifth novel.