July's People (19 page)

A Sport of Nature

‘Vast as the veld and teeming as a township,
A Sport of Nature
expansively encompasses over forty years of South African experience’–
Independent

‘A spontaneous, pretty white girl, disturbing to men and most alive in her own sexuality, is transformed into a political activist, intent on returning the whole African continent to the rule of Africans … This is the bold theme of Nadine Gordimer’s new novel … an exhilarating book’ –
Observer

‘Apartheid is the narrow, metallic counter on which Gordimer throws down her human coinage to test its essential trueness … she writes with an energy and beauty as remarkable as that of her heroine’ –
Spectator

‘Absorbing, unpredictable, always herself … in Hillela Gordimer has created a thoroughly believable heroine for our times’ –
Evening Standard

‘As a primer, too, on African politics, one couldn’t do better than read
A Sport of Nature’ – New Statesman

‘Compulsively readable … a genuinely picaresque novel’ –
The Times

‘The finest achievement yet of a magnificent writer’ –
Sunday Telegraph

The Conservationist

‘A triumph of style … this is a novel of enormous power’ – Paul Theroux in the
New Statesman

Mehring is rich. He has all that white privilege in South Africa can give him. Isolated, at once cold and passionate, he challenges history in his determination that nothing shall change his way of life.

But Africa cannot be bought by the white man, now.

‘One of those rare works of literature that command special respect reserved for artistic daring and fulfilled ambition’ – Paul Bailey in the
Observer

‘The sounds, smells of foliage, the weaving lights of the veld, are evoked in passages of cool delicate prose that prove their author one of the ablest descriptive writers alive’ – Peter Kerr-Jarrett in the
Sunday Telegraph

Joint winner of the 1974 Booker Prize.

A Guest of Honour

‘Coming back’s a kind of dream, a joke … like living happily ever after.’

Evelyn Bray has returned to a newly created African state and accepted the temporary post of special education adviser.

In doing so he falls into the trap of ‘nice white liberals getting mixed up in things they don’t understand’. Or was it infinitely more complicated than that?

‘
A Guest of Honour
, Nadine Gordimer’s massive book about an ex-colonial Englishman’s affair with a new African State, is a novel of total immersion – physical, moral, political. It teems with human life, with landscapes of the map and of the mind, with events and insights – a deeply impressive work’ –
Guardian

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

The Late Bourgeois World

One Saturday morning Liz van den Sandt opens a telegram which tells her that her ex-husband, Max, has drowned himself.

Much had drowned with him. They had wanted to live
well
, in the best, most honourable sense: not at the cost of others – something not possible in South Africa when you were white. And Max, highly strung, sensitive and intelligent, found it increasingly impossible to bear the burden of betrayal and the slow erosion of his self-respect.

This remarkable novel takes as its theme the crisis which beset white people in the struggle against apartheid in the South Africa of the sixties. Prescient, tender, pitiless, incisive, it reveals a great novelist at the height of her powers.

‘Superb’ –
The New York Times

‘Miss Gordimer has earned herself a place among the few novelists who really matter’ –
Observer

Six Feet of the Country

‘Gordimer’s setting is Africa … but in her Africa we find ourselves’ –
Washington Post

Seven stories from South Africa’s finest living writer that distil the essence of what has been happening in that country in recent years, through people and landscapes so intensely and evocatively drawn that they seem to burn a hole in the page.

‘Sensuous, witty, wise … her qualities need no inventory from me’ – Christopher Wordsworth in the
Guardian

‘To read her is to discover Africa’s realities’ – Paul Theroux in the
New Statesman

The stories included here have been selected from two previous collections,
No Place Like
and
A Soldier’s Embrace
.

Burger’s Daughter

In this brilliantly realized work Nadine Gordimer unfolds the story of a young woman’s slowly evolving identity in the turbulent political environment of present-day South Africa. Her father’s death in prison leaves Rosa Burger alone to explore the intricacies of what it actually means to be Burger’s daughter. Moving through an overwhelming flood of sensuously described memories that will not release her, she arrives at last at a fresh understanding of her life. Nadine Gordimer’s subtle, fastidiously crafted prose sweeps this engrossing narrative to a triumphant conclusion.

‘A riveting history of South Africa and a penetrating portrait of a courageous woman’ –
The New Yorker

‘This is a novel of social and political import which is also an intensely subjective prose poem, mesmerizing in the subtle cadences of its language’ – Joyce Carol Oates

‘Controlled density, subtlety, and vitality … a beautifully manipulated work of art’ –
The Observer

Something Out There

‘Outstanding … it is in the conviction which Nadine Gordimer brings to her wise understanding of human relationships that she luminously excels’ –
The Times

This powerful collection of short stories and a novella reflects Nadine Gordimer’s extraordinary ability to illuminate the connection between the personal and the political in the divided society of South Africa. With compassion and scrupulous honesty, Gordimer penetrates to the core of the human heart, revealing the subtlest feelings of her characters – black and white, revolutionaries and racists, adulterers, spinsters, and lovers.

‘Her best stories deserve a place on the same shelf as the masterpieces of the genre’ –
Chicago Tribune

‘The power and sensitivity of her perceptions mark her as an artist of the very first rank – a truthteller, in fact’ –
The Wall Street Journal

Also published

A Soldier’s Embrace

A World of Strangers

Selected Stories

The Essential Gesture