THE LAST TIME Silas Ali encountered the lieutenant, Silas was locked in the back of a police van and the lieutenant was viciously raping Lydia, Silas’s wife. But a chance encounter twenty years later brings crimes from the past crashing into the present, shattering the fragile shell of normalcy that defines the Alis’ family life. Bitter Fruit is the story of Silas, Lydia and their circle of friends and family living in post-apartheid South Africa. It is also the story of their son Mikey, a child of “the new South Africa,” a young man whose own identity crisis, sexual adventuring and murderous search for his biological father are about to explode.