set in the bitter twilight of apartheid in south africa in the 1970s, the smell of apples is a haunting story narrated by eleven-year-old marnus erasmus, who records the social turmoil and racial oppression that are destroying his own land. using his family as a microcosm of the corroding society at large, marnus tells a troubling tale of a childhood corrupted, of unexpected sexual defilements, and of an innocence gone astray.