Before the knife

What happened to me happed to all of us - my mother, my father, my sisters and me: we all fell apart under the horror of it, and we all tried to pretend that there was no horror.Here in her own words, prize winning novelist Carolyn Slaughter tells the story of a family that that destroyed itself from within, and of the ways she found to overcome terrors that no child should have to bear.Growing up in a remote British protectorate (now Botswana) in the heart of the Kalahari Desert, Carolyn was inspired by the stark beauty of her childhood home. All too soon, this magnificent and isolated landscape would become a refuge for a six-year-old girl with nowhere to turn. Neither her mother, doomed by depression and guilt, nor her sister could shield her from the most terrible of violations. In the end, she would learn not only to survive, but how to save her own soul.