In the early 1980s, young mining engineer Barney and recently qualified teacher, Julia, enjoy the romantic excitement and the eternal sunshine of expatriate lifestyle on the Copperbelt in the heart of Africa.
Julia grew up in Zambia and feels the urge to return to her roots. She is looking for a man to love and to look after her, in the way she has never been by her emotionally sterile family. She wants to be accepted into the conventional hierarchy of the community in which she finds herself. He just wants a good time.
With a shared interest in drama and a tragic experience trying to save a life, their connection begins. The relationship is passionate but rocky and after a journey to the South African coast which is fraught with emotional disaster, they separate. They each find their own way in the world believing they will never see each other again.
But thirty years later they meet, flung together by fate and Facebook. In the unlikely setting of the snowy steppe of Kazakhstan and in the thirty short hours they have together, they unlock the secrets of the past and realise their previous affair had been destined to fail having been at the wrong time in the wrong place.
A Year in Luanshya And 30 Hours In Kazakhstan explores the contrast between how Julia and Barney lived and loved in youth and then in maturity. It shows how they were shaped by that one year in the eighties and how their lives and their characters have changed over thirty years. Barney has a great deal to atone for and Julia has a monumental decision to make, when together they confront the dreadful consequences of their actions in 1984. It is the sort of romance that will leave you alternately heartbroken and overjoyed.
