Annie Firman is growing up in Johannesburg in apartheid South Africa, in an affluent white suburb and a local girls' boarding-school. She and her friend Barb 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 'colored' boy of her own age whom she can order to do her will.The writing is witty, comic, and lightly satirical, but for all the simplicity of the story it is a profoundly moral and challenging novel. Published first in England, it was banned in South Africa for ten years, then republished in that country when the process of 'liberalization' began.