It is the Swinging Sixties. Rex Duval arrives in Cape Town to teach English Literature at the university. Freshly promoted from Oxford, debonair and dashing, he takes Cape academia and society by storm. In his wake come Milla and Gladys, luscious twin sisters in search of the good life. Gladys lands a wealthy local layabout named Edward, while Milla marries Rex. With gay abandon the Duvals, with Gladys and Edward in tow, gallivant from the Mother City to the beach cottage in Hermanus and to Europe in pursuit of gratification and of Rex's quixotic scholarly obsession with a dead writer named Finch Magnus Finch. There is no end to the complications that bedevil their lives. The whirlwinds that Rex churns up around himself soon produce stormy clouds over his career and family. When the wind of change sweeps over his colonial playground, his life spins out of control, while at the university he is furiously digging his own grave. And through it all the long-suffering Edwardpowerlessly witnesses his friend, the object of his most secret longing, go down, and ponders how to settle scores.