The Kopje Farm

Jack Lovat is seventeen, Scottish-born, and working his family's ostrich farm in the South African veld when war arrives at their door. The Boer commandos are moving through the region, and one morning Jack and his native foreman Pete receive a warning: riders have been spotted on the kopje. His father wants only to protect the flock and wait out the conflict. Jack has already decided otherwise. This is a novel about the held breath before violence, the way a family fracture under the pressure of approaching danger. Johnston writes the ostrich farm with an outsider's fascination and a craftsman's eye: the strange birds wandering the rocky hill, the daily rhythms of feeding and cleaning, the isolation that makes news of the war feel impossibly far until suddenly it isn't. The Boer War becomes personal when it crosses the horizon. Jack wants to fight. His father wants to survive. Both are right, and neither is wrong. What follows tests their bond and their resolve in ways neither anticipated. This is adventure fiction with real psychological weight, a story about what happens to ordinary people when history crashes into their pasture.