Nadine Gordimer

Dust jacket design by Seymour Chwast. Her 4th book and 2nd novel. The story of a young Englishman who moves to South Africa and discovers the great disparity between life of the colonists and the English ruling class.

When her ex-husband commits suicide after the failure of his anti-government activities, Liz Van Den Sandt struggles to decide whether to become involved in the South African Black nationalist movement

As a depiction of South Africa, this novel is more revealing than a thousand news dispatches as it tells the story of a young woman cast in the role of a young revolutionary, trying to uphold a heritage handed on by martyred parents while carving out a sense of one's self.

For years, it had been what is called a “deteriorating situation.” Now all over South Africa the cities are battlegrounds. The members of the Smales family—liberal whites—are rescued from the terror by their servant, July, who leads them to refuge in his village. What happens to the Smaleses and to July—the shifts in character and relationships—gives us an unforgettable look into the terrifying, tacit understandings and misunderstandings between blacks and whites.Nadine Gordimer was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewarsship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.

When Julie Summers's car breaks down on a sleazy street in a South African city, a young Arab mechanic named Abdu comes to her aid. Their attraction to one another is fueled by different motives. Julie is in rebellion against her wealthy background and her father; Abdu, an illegal immigrant, is desperate to avoid deportation to his impoverished country. In the course of their relationship, there are unpredictable consequences, and overwhelming emotions will overturn each one's notion of the other. Set in the new South Africa and in an Arab village in the desert, The Pickup is "a masterpiece of creative empathy . . . a gripping tale of contemporary anguish and unexpected desire, and it also opens the Arab world to unusually nuanced perception" (Edward W. Said).

From South Africa's most pre-eminent writer comes a tense and intimate family drama about how we come to love.

How else can you defend yourself against losing your hi-fi equipment, your tv set and computer, your watch and rings a house gun, like a house cat; that is a fact of ordinary life in many cities of the world as we come to the end of the twentieth century, especially in south africa at this time the successful, respected executive director of an insurance company, harold, and his doctor wife, claudia, for whom violence could never be a means of solving personal conflict, are faced with something that could never happen to their son has committed murder what kind of loyalty do a mother and a father owe a son who has committed this unimaginable horror what have they done, in influencing his character; more ominously, where is it they have failed him the house gun is a passionate narrative of love being particularly complex between parents and their children it moves with the restless pace of living itself, from the intimate to the general condition; if it is a parable of present violence, it is also an affirmation of the will to human reconciliation that starts where it must, between individuals

In these sixteen stories ranging from the dynamics of family life to the worldwide confusion of human values, Nadine Gordimer gives us access to many lives in places as far apart as suburban London, Mozambique, a mythical island, and South Africa. In "Some Are Born to Sweet Delight, " a girl's innocent love for an enigmatic foreign lodger in her parents' home leads her to involve others in a tragedy of international terrorism. "The Moment Before the Gun Went Off" reveals the strange mystery behind an accident in which a white farmer has killed a black boy. "Once Upon a Time" is a horrifying fairy tale about a child raised in a society founded on fear.

The Nobel Prize-winning author tells the emotional story of two couples, one black and one white, whose complex relationships evolve as they face the hazards and hopes of post-apartheid South Africa. Reprint.

After being abandoned by her mother, Hillela was pushed onto relatives where she was taught social graces. But when she betrayed her position as surrogate daughter, she was cast adrift. Later she fell into a heroic role in the overthrow of apartheid.

"You're not responsible for your ancestry, are you . . . But if that's so, why have marched under banned slogans, got yourself beaten up by the police, arrested a couple of times; plastered walls with subversive posters . . . The past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognizes it."In this collection of new stories, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black , Nadine Gordimer crosses the frontiers of politics, memory, sexuality, and love with the fearless insight that is the hallmark of her writing. In the title story a middle-aged academic who had been an anti-apartheid activist embarks on an unadmitted pursuit of the possibilities for his own racial identity in his great-grandfather's fortune-hunting interlude of living rough on diamond diggings in South Africa, his young wife far away in London. "Dreaming of the Dead" conjures up a lunch in a New York Chinese restaurant where Susan Sontag and Edward Said return in surprising new avatars as guests in the dream of a loving friend. The historian in "History" is a parrot who confronts people with the scandalizing voice reproduction of quarrels and clandestine love-talk on which it has eavesdropped."Alternative Endings" considers the way writers make arbitrary choices in how to end stories―and offers three, each relating the same situation, but with a different resolution, arrived at by the three sight, sound, and smell.

A sharply observed new novel about post-apartheid South Africa from the Nobel Prize winnerNadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks—with a clear-eyed fierceness, a lack of sentimentality, and a deep understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul—her eternal themes: the inextricable link between personal and communal history; the inescapable moral ambiguities of daily life; the political and racial tensions that persist in her homeland, South Africa. And in each new work is fresh evidence of her literary genius: in the sharpness of her psychological insights, the stark beauty of her language, the complexity of her characters, and the difficult choices with which they are faced. In No Time Like the Present, Gordimer trains her keen eye on Steve and Jabulile, an interracial couple living in a newly, tentatively, free South Africa. They have a daughter, Sindiswa; they move to the suburbs; Steve becomes a lecturer at a university; Jabulile trains to become a lawyer; there is another child, a boy this time. There is nothing so extraordinary about their lives, and yet, in telling their story and the stories of their friends and families, Gordimer manages to capture the tortured, fragmented essence of a nation struggling to define itself post-apartheid. The subject is contemporary, but Gordimer’s treatment is, as ever, timeless. In No Time Like the Present, she shows herself once again a master novelist, at the height of her prodigious powers.

Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer follows the inner lives of characters confronted by unforeseen circumstances. Paul Bannerman, an ecologist in South Africa, believes he understands the trajectory of his life, with the usual markers of vocation and marriage. But when he's diagnosed with thyroid cancer and, after surgery, prescribed treatment that will leave him radioactive-and for a period a danger to others-he begins to question, as Auden wrote, "what Authority gives / existence its surprise." As Paul recuperates in the garden of his childhood home, he enters an unthinkable existence and another kind of illumination-a process that will irrevocably change not only his life but the lives of his wife and parents. "More profound, more searching, more accomplished than what she was writing earlier in her long and distinguished career."- Los Angeles Times"Nadine Gordimer's work is endowed with an emotional genius so palpable one experiences it like a finger pressing steadily upon the prose."- The Village Voice"A timely novel and a provocative a novel to enjoy and ponder, as its characters all do, the dizzying complications inherent in human choice."- The Washington Times"I will always be grateful for the presence in the world of Nadine Gordimer, who has delivered in literature a South Africa most of us could not have known without her."-Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

Seven stories of South Africa deal with a missing body, a mysterious Rhodesian visitor, a pass law protest, a white geologist and his Black secretary, and a pair of childhood sweethearts

With her characteristic brilliance, Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer follows the inner lives of characters confronted by unforeseen circumstances. An earthquake offers tragedy and opportunity in the title story, exposing both an ocean bed strewn with treasure and the avarice of the town's survivors. "Mission Statement" is the story of a bureaucrat's idealism, the ghosts of colonial history, and a love affair with a government minister that ends astoundingly. And in "Karma," Gordimer's inventiveness knows no in five returns to earthly life, a disembodied narrator, taking on different ages and genders, testifies to unfinished business and questions the nature of existence. Revelatory and powerful, these are stories that challenge our deepest convictions even as they dazzle us with their artful lyricism.

Once Upon a Time by Nadine Gordimer is anything but a fairy tale. It’s more of a dystopian fantasy - with overtones of the racial inequality in Gordimer’s native South Africa. Read by Alex Kingston.

In stories written over a period of thirty years, individuals caught up in racial and other South African tensions choose or fall victim to visions and fears of freedom and change

Nadine Gordimer's first novel, published in 1953, tells the story of Helen Shaw, daughter of white middle-class parents in a small gold-mining town in South Africa. As Helen comes of age, so does her awareness grow of the African life around her. Her involvement, as a bohemian student, with young blacks leads her into complex relationships of emotion and action in a culture of dissension.

Contents: A city of the dead, a city of the living --At the rendezvous of victory --Letter from his father --Crimes of conscience --Sins of the third age --Blinder --Rags and bones --Terminal --A correspondence course --Something out there

James Bray, an English colonial administrator who was expelled from a central African nation for siding with its black nationalist leaders, is invited back ten years later to join in the country's independence celebrations. As he witnesses the factionalism and violence that erupt as revolutionary ideals are subverted by ambition and greed, Bray is once again forced to choose sides, a choice that becomes both his triumph and his undoing.

A stunning selection of the best short fiction from the recipient of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureThis collection of Nadine Gordimer's short fiction demonstrates her rich use of language and her unsparing vision of politics, sexuality, and race. Whether writing about lovers, parents and children, or married couples, Gordimer maps out the terrain of human relationships with razor-sharp psychological insight and a stunning lack of sentimentality. The selection, which spans the course of Gordimer's career to date, presents the range of her storytelling abilities and her brilliant insight into human nature. From such epics as "Friday's Footprint" and "Something Out There" to her shorter, more experimental stories, Gordimer's work is unfailingly nuanced and complex. Time and again, it forces us to examine how our stated intentions come into conflict with our unspoken desires.This definitive volume, which includes four new stories from the Nobel laureate, is a testament to the power, force, and ongoing relevance of Gordimer's vision.

First published in 1963, this novel explores the love affair between a black man and a white woman in a time when lovers could be imprisoned for breaking the law against sexual relations across the colour bar.

A collection of short stories exploring the emotional and physical landscapes of South Africa.Contents: A soldier's embrace -- A lion on the freeway -- Siblings -- Time did -- A hunting accident -- For dear life -- Town and country lovers one -- (Two) -- A mad one -- You name it -- The termitary -- The need for something sweet -- Oral history.

"Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature," is one of today's most talented prose-fiction writers. This powerful collection of short stories, set in her native Southern Africa, reveals her outstanding ability to pierce the core of the human condition of those, both black and white, living in countries where repression and coercion is the norm.Although Gordimer illustrates vividly the subtleties of her characters' emotions, there is always the awareness of the larger canvas, the turmoil of a violent world outside the individual incidents, where the instability of fear and uncertainty lead unwittingly to crimes of conscience.

Whether talking about her own writing, interpreting the works of others, or giving us a window on the world that "we in South Africa are attempting to reconstruct," Nadine Gordimer has much to tell us about the art of fiction and the art of life. In this deeply resonant book Gordimer examines the tension for a writer between life's experiences and narrative creations. She asks first, where do characters come from--to what extent are they drawn from real life? We are touching on this question whenever we insist on the facts behind the fiction, Gordimer suggests, and here she tries to unravel the mysterious process that breathes "real" life into fiction. Exploring the writings of revolutionaries in South Africa, she shows how their struggle is contrastingly expressed in factual accounts and in lyrical poetry. Gordimer next turns to three writers linked by their search for a life that transcends their own time and in distinctive and telling ways, Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Oz defy accepted norms of loyalty to the mores and politics of their countries. Their search in Egypt, Nigeria, and Israel for a meaningful definition of home testifies to what it must the destination of the human spirit beyond national boundaries. Ending on a personal note, Gordimer reveals her own experience of "writing her way out of" the confines of a dying colonialism.