The story is set in 1945 South Africa. Colonel Willem Stewart de Veer flies in the face of convention, and segregation, by marrying a coloured woman. His family disown him; but they meet again, this time on opposing sides in the political struggle. Willem Stewart must contend with the head of the de Veer family, Paulus de Veer, and a handful of tenacious supremacists in a tense clash of the personal and the political. Lily Mabura is a fiction and children's author who was born and lives in Kenya. Her children's book, Ali and the Little Sultan won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature. The Pretoria Conspiracy, her first novel, was awarded the (Kenyan) National Book Week Literary Award for the Best First Novel in 2001.