Yvonne Roberts' third novel, A History of Insects, is a compelling, and painful, vision of childhood. It's 1956, in Peshawar, Pakistan, a city torn between Muslim and Sikh, Christian and the British Raj. Ella Jackson, child of the colonial administration, lives out a lonely life on the fringes of an adult world riven with political, racial and sexual conflict: "Eye to the crack in the door, she could see most of the brightly lit room. A grown-up, blindfolded and wearing a party dress, was crawling around on her hands and knees, one arm outstretched, squeaking." From its opening pages, the strangeness of grown-up behaviour, the young girl's struggle to make sense of what she sees around her, drives Roberts' novel. This is a story with a secret, one that belongs to a child but also to a community desperate not to acknowledge that it is built on something rotten, something that perverts the relations between ruler and ruled, husband and wife, adult and child.