Jacques Beauvilliers, the wealthy owner of the Bonne Esperance vineyards, has four daughters by his English wife - and a half-caste son by the beautiful slave girl, Eva. Suzanne, in love with a Boer rebel; Prudence, kept from the job she longs for by her sex; Emily born at the cost of her mother's life; and Jean Jacques, neither black nor white, master nor slave, are each caught between two worlds. Only Clara is undivided, and her passionate hatred threatens to destroy them all. As three generations of the Beauvilliers family are torn by conflicts of black and white, British and Afrikaner, man and woman, Reap The Whirlwind traces the roots of apartheid in a breathtaking panorama of the richness, tragedy, and vital heart of nineteenth-century South Africa.