Africa. 1930s. Martha Quest's 3rd-person PoV, though we dip into various heads. She's 15. Her younger brother Jonathan's not as clever as her, but he's the one who's sent to school. She dislikes her parents, sometimes saying so to their face. They're not very rich. Her mother's friend is Mrs van Rensberg, Afrikaans, who has 11 children, including Marnie, who wears lipstick. Her father owns a plantation. Martha is reading Havelock Ellis (the Cohen boys lent her the book) and is (rebelliously) interested in Modern Art and politics.
At p.17 it's already a year later. Joss Cohen fancies her but she's stayed away. She's missed an important exam because of illness. Her father has diabetes. Their house "was original because a plan which was really suitable for bricks and proper roofing had been carried out in grass and mud and stamped dung". The furniture was made out of petrol boxes.
She lives miles from the nearest village - multicultural, with casual racism. She and her mother argue, her father a buffer. She visits Joss, wanting to see him again. Suddenly she moves to the city, getting a secretarial job (thanks to Joss) with Joss's uncle at a law firm. A man unknown to her, Donovan Anderson, asks her out - his mother had been contacted by Martha's mother. She meets his young friends. After a few weeks Joss pops in on the way to Cape Town university. Abraham, son of the boss, has joined the Spanish Civil War. Joss gets her in touch with the Left Book Club and with Jasmine. Her mother phones around and receives some bad reviews about Martha, who's enjoying herself. Mrs Gunn, her landlady, is supportive. Don helps her dress and helps with her make-up but she's still very much a virgin with a reputation for being clever and changing moods. The wolves (predatory males) are after her. She pities and hates them. She's soon bored of all-night parties, wondering whether to become an army nurse. She has sex with Adolph, an unpopular jew. She likes him best straight after sex, suggesting once that they marry. She's told that he says nasty things about her, that he boasts. Her friends have a word with him. They don't see each other again.
She meets Douglas, 30, one of the original wolves. She soon realises that he shares her views about the natives, etc. She can be natural with him. He resists her offer of sex, saying he's engaged to an English girl. She agrees to marry him in 10 days then regrets it the next morning. By then the town knows - he's been celebrating all night. They visit her parents, who give their consent and talk about Hitler. The couple are married back in town, in a flat.
The narrative viewpoint can be restless. On p.8 for example, in a paragraph when the landscape is being described, there's "In the literature that was her tradition, the word farm evokes an image of something orderly ... Martha looked over a mile or so of bush" (books, then Martha); "The fields were a timid intrusion on a landscape hardly marked by man" (narrator); "the hawk which circled in mile-wide sweeps over her head saw the house ... then nothing that a thousand generations of his hawk ancestors had not seen" (hawk then narrator).
The author uses various ways of showing that what people say isn't what they think - flashback, change of PoV, etc.
Martha doesn't want to follow convention. There's conflict between playing roles and being true to herself - it makes her appear self-contradictory.
There's lively language - e.g. "ears rioting out on either side like scrolls". And there's repetition at peak moments - "and the young woman at the other end of the table laughed, and they all laughed, and the rain fell endlessly, everything rushed and gurgled and swam, and they laughed again"
