Annie Firman is growing up in Johannesburg in race-segregated South Africa, in an affluent white suburb and a local girls' boardingschool. She and her friend Barbara long to be initiated into the mysteries of adult life, above all to taste the forbidden fruit of sexual love. Annie falls heavily for a pretentious young man, a photographer who draws her on but finally lets her down. Bitterly disappointed, she consoles herself by making love, against the law, to a "coloured" boy of her own age. She feels she needs to take care of him - and can order him to do her will.
The writing is comic and lightly satirical, but for all the simplicity of the story, this is a profoundly moral and challenging novel.