Brazzaville Beach consists of three separative narratives. The first is Hope Clearwater's reflections on her current life whilst living in a beach house on Brazzaville Beach. The second narrative is a description of her former marriage to John Clearwater, a mathematician, who gradually goes mad resulting from failure to make progress in his academic research. The third narrative, and by far the most graphic, is the narrator's account of her work in a national park called Grosso Arvore (Big Tree), where she tracks the movements of a small band of chimpanzees that have split off from a larger group in the north.