From their vantage point in the branches of an old oak tree, three children watch as a body is pulled from the dam on their parents’ South African farm.
Decades later, when a tin box containing a gun and his father’s suicide note is exhumed from under that same oak tree, Robert Coombes is faced with a flood of memories from the time leading up to his father’s death, and the dark history of the farm that he has inherited.
If you plant a gun, does a gun tree grow? Robert’s six-year-old self asks.
Only in the mind of a child, he thinks. There it grows until it blots out everything.
