Turbott Wolfe

Originally published by Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, William Plomer’s South African masterpiece Turbott Wolfe was a hit sensation in both the UK and USA. In South Africa, the land of Plomer’s birth, it met with a different response. With its theme of interracial love the book caused, as one commentator put it, ‘an intellectual riot’. Written when Plomer was only nineteen, while he was living on a Zulu reserve in northern Natal, the novel retells the story of an eccentric Englishman who despises the racism he encounters in South Africa. Witty and satirical, Turbott Wolfe was considered by Virginia Woolf and Cyril Conolly to be one of the key novels of the Modernist period. Ian Fleming, Plomer’s friend and creator of James Bond, considered it one of the ten best books he’d ever read.