The Virgins

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.

Paperback. English. David Philip. 1986. Used.