Richard Stengel journeyed to South Africa in the late 1980s to chronicle life under apartheid. He ended up spending months in a small rural town where the white authorities were attempting to forcibly remove a black township. He tells this moving story through the lives of three families--one white, one black, one Indian--over the course of a single day for each of them. The private lives of each family reveal what it was like to live in a society where everyone is judged by the color of his or her skin.​

Stengel reveals the hopes and dreams of each of these families, and their resilient optimism about the future. In a new introduction, Stengel describes how some of those hopes even came to pass with the eventual release of Nelson Mandela and the election of the country's first truly democratic government.