Anna Kavan's autobiographical novel tells the story of a woman trapped in a marriage in colonial Burma whose husband, a British officer and drunkard, kills rats with his tennis racket to pass the time. These are the plaintive Who are you? Who are you?" calls of the birds in the tamarind trees, which set the pervasive, monotonous topic of isolation and inner exile, but also show a way out of the search for identity and liberation.

Between existential disillusionment and poetic resistance, Anna Kavan succeeds in creating a more than real inner world with her hallucinatory prose, whose crystalline sharpness still freezes the surrounding heat.