Torn away from her college lover, Susan Henderson, eighteen year auburn-haired beauty, has to join her guardian in far off South Africa, and there she is rapidly embroiled in a life of sexual encounters - both joyful and painful. The revenge of a sadistic airline steward for an inadvertant slight on the flight from England; the unexpected and unjust response from the parents of a floundering child she saves from the surf off one of Cape Town's beautiful beaches; the fascination of watching her guardian inflicting a degrading lesson on a woman who tries to put him out of business - and the fear as the woman gains retribution by kidnapping Susan and giving her to a farmhand for his pleasure. Susan endures all this and more, and gradually learns the complex pleasures of pain and humiliation, and realises that her destiny had always been waiting in her new country.