Islands covers the first fifty years of the Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For the indigenous peoples it is the beginning of the end of a way of life in close interaction with the land, its seasons and rhythms, its harshness and abundance.

Through the life stories of seven men who are involved with beautiful Pieternella, the daughter of the first mixed marriage of the new colony, whole new geographies and new dimensions of experience emerge, new sources and modes of power. And behind these men loom the ones who make the decisions, the commanders and governors and captains, and the still greater, more shadowy potentates, the Lords Seventeen, who are in charge of the Dutch East India Company.