Emma McCune was vibrant and beautiful when she went as an aid worker in 1989 to help children in war-torn Sudan. But her life changed dramatically when she fell in love with Riek Machar, a charismatic war lord in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), and married him in a simple bush ceremony. Despite her personal happiness and the devotion of Riek’s people, rifts between rival factions of freedom fighters put a price on her head. And at twenty-nine, when she was expecting their first child, her life was tragically cut short.

Till the Sun Grows Cold is Maggie, Emma’s mother’s, spiritual journey from India, where she was born, to England and Africa in search of her own past and its resonances with her daughter’s extraordinary life. It is a personal odyssey: an attempt to make sense of her daughter’s brief existence from an unconventional middle-England childhood – in which she witnessed the break-up of her parents’ marriage and her father’s bankruptcy and suicide – to her dangerous life on one side of Sudan’s civil war, a life which Emma recorded in diaries at the time.

Till the Sun Grows Cold is a voyage of discovery about Emma and Maggie, revisiting both their shared and separate pasts. Maggie McCune writes from the perspective of a mother who, upon her daughter’s death, must look back and ask, ‘How did we get from there to here?’ and movingly weaves together Emma’s own fragmentary accounts of her life in Sudan and her own very unusual story.