Most Popular Books by Nadine Gordimer

When Paul Bannerman, an ecologist in Africa, is diagnosed with cancer and prescribed treatment that makes him radioactive, his suddenly fragile existence makes him question his life for the first time. He is especially struck by the contradiction in values between his work as a conservationist and that of his wife, an advertising agency executive. Then when Paul moves in with his parents to protect his wife and young son from radiation, the strange nature of his condition leads his mother to face her own past.

Toby Hood, a young Englishman, shuns the politics and the causes his liberal parents passionately support. Living in Johannesburg as a representative of his family''s publishing company, Toby moves easily, carelessly, between the complacent wealthy white suburbs and the seething, vibrantly alive black townships. His friends include a wide variety of people, from mining directors to black journalists and musicians, and Toby''s colonial-style weekends are often interspersed with clandestine evenings spent in black shanty towns. Toby''s friendship with Steven Sithole, a dashing, embittered young African, touches him in ways he never thought possible, and when Steven''s own sense of independence from the rules of society leads to tragedy, Toby''s life is changed forever.

In this deeply resonant book, Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer examines the tension for a writer between life''s experiences and narrative creations, investigating where characters come from--to what extent are they drawn from real life?--and using the writings of South African revolutionaries to show how their struggle is contrastingly expressed in factual fiction and in lyrical poetry.

Fifteen thematically and geographically wide-ranging stories from the Nobel Prize Winner, with settings ranging from suburban London to Mozambique.

Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour Nadine Gordimer is one of the contemporary world''s most admired writers of novels and short stories. This volume collects three decades of her interviews. In them she presents her attitudes toward her art and its interconnection with the oppressive, volatile politics in her native land. She has traveled extensively to other countries only to discover that no matter how white her skin she is indeed African and the only country she can call home is South Africa. If you write honestly about life in South Africa, apartheid damns itself, she says. She is ruthlessly honest, and her fiction has played the vital role of communicating in detail to the rest of the world the effects of apartheid upon the daily lives of the South African people. To maintain her integrity, she writes as though she were dead, without any thought of how anyone will react to what she has written. She remains heroically undaunted both by the banning of three of her novels by the white government and by the protests of radical blacks who assert that whites cannot write convincingly about blacks.She is concerned neither with the image of blacks nor with the image of whites, only with revealing the complexity, the full truth. This truth condemns the racism upon which apartheid is built. In her nine novels and eight volumes of short stories, Gordimer digs deeper and deeper until she has thematic layers. These include betrayal-political, sexual, every form and power, the way human beings use power in their relationships. Her accounts in these interviews of how she works and of which writers she admires will fascinate readers, scholars, teachers, and students alike. Co-editors Nancy Topping Bazin retired from the faculty of the English and women''s studies departments at Old Dominion University, and Marilyn Dallman Seymour retired from the staff of the Government Publications Department of the Old Dominion University Library.

A terrifyingly plausible vision from one of the most enduring and acclaimed writers in the English language

None to Accompany Me is arresting and reverbant - perhaps the most powerful novel to date by one of the world''s most commanding writers. In an extraordinary period immediately before the first non-racial election and the beginning of majority rule in South Africa, Vera Stark, the protagonist of Nadine Gordimer''s passionate novel, weaves a ruthless interpretation of her own past into her participation into the present as a lawyer representing blacks in the struggle to reclaim the land.

"This is a novel of enormous power'' New Statesman ''Gordimer is a great writer ... It is Turgenev that she most brings to mind'' -- New York Review of Books The Booker Prize winning political novel by the Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Gordimer 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 stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.

A bold, sweeping story of one girl''s rise from obscurity to an unpredictable kind of political powerAbandoned by her mother, Hillela is left to be raised by her two aunts in South Africa. At Olga''s she might have acquired a taste for antiques and a style of dress to please a suitable husband. At Pauline''s she might have developed a social conscience. But Hillela''s betrayal of her position as a surrogate daughter so shocks both families that at seventeen she is cast adrift.Swiftly and perilously, her life opens out. She lives as a footloose girl among political exiles on a beach in East Africa, drifting between jobs and lovers, and finally becomes the wife of a black revolutionary. Personal tragedy is ultimately the catalyst for her political development, leading her into a heroic role in the overthrow of apartheid.

Brilliant and shocking novel set in South Africa by the Nobel Prize-winner

A relationship forms between an Arab mechanic desperate to avoid deportation and a rich young woman desperate to escape her family''s control.

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.

"A riveting history of South Africa and a penetrating portrait of a courageous woman." -- The New Yorker A must read fiction of South Africa from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature This is the moving story of the unforgettable Rosa Burger, a young woman from South Africa cast in the mold of a revolutionary tradition. Rosa tries to uphold her heritage handed on by martyred parents while still carving out a sense of self. Although it is wholly of today, Burger''s Daughter can be compared to those 19th century Russian classics that make a certain time and place come alive, and yet stand as universal celebrations of the human spirit. Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born and lives in South Africa.

A collection of nine stories and one novella explore the secret and collusive codes by which people live together.

The new collection of stories from the South African Nobel laureate

A sharply observed new novel about post-apartheid South Africa from the Nobel Prize winner Nadine 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.

Nadine Gordimer''s novel is a passionate narrative of the complex manifestations of that final test of human relations we call love. It moves with the restless pace of living itself; if it is a parable of present violence, it is also an affirmation of the will to reconciliation that starts where it must, between individual men and women.

Jessie and Tom Stilwell keep open house. Their code is one of people determined to maintain the integrity of personal relations against the distortions of law and society.The impact on their home of Boaz Davis and his wife Ann, arrived from England, and Gideon Shibalo, the Stilwells'' black friend, with whom Ann starts a love affair as her adventure with Africa, is dramatically concurrent with events involving Jessie''s strange relationship with her mother and stepfather and her son from a previous marriage.Telling their story against the background of South Africa in the sixties, Nadine Gordimer speaks with unsurpassed subtlety and poignancy of individuals and the society in which they live.

An astounding collection of personal and political stories set in varied locales and cultures. In this collection of sixteen stories, Gordimer brings unforgettable characters from every corner of society to life: a child refugee fleeing civil war in Mozambique; a black activist''s deserted wife longing for better times; a rich safari party indulging themselves while lionesses circle their lodge. Chhalang is a vivid, disturbing and rewarding portrait of life in South Africa under apartheid.

Internationally celebrated for her novels, Nadine Gordimer has devoted much of her life and fiction to the political struggles of the Third World, the New World, and her native South Africa. Living in Hope and History is an on-the-spot record of her years as a public figure--an observer of apartheid and its aftermath, a member of the ANC, and the champion of dissident writers everywhere. In a letter to fellow Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, Nadine Gordimer describes Living in Hope and History as a "modest book of some of the nonfiction pieces I''ve written, a reflection of how I''ve looked at this century I''ve lived in." It is, in fact, an extraordinary collection of essays, articles, and addresses delivered over four decades, including her Nobel Prize Lecture of 1991.

Liz Van Den Sandt''s ex-husband, Max, an ineffectual rebel, has drowned himself. In prison for a failed act of violence against the government, he had betrayed his colleagues.Now Liz has been asked to perform a direct service for the Black Nationalist movement, at considerable danger to herself. Can she take such a risk in the face of Max''s example of the uselessness of such actions? Yet ... how can she not?

"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 senses: sight, sound, and smell.

A schoolboy playing truant bumps into his revered father coming out of a cinema with a woman.

A selection of 31 stories from the South African author''s work.

Nadine Gordimer''s life reflects the true spirit of the writer as moral activist, political visionary and literary icon. Telling Times collects together all her non-fiction for the first time, spanning more than half a century, from the twilight of colonial rule in South Africa, to the long, brutal fight to overthrow South Africa''s apartheid regime and to her leadership role over the last 20 years in confronting the dangers of AIDS, globalisation, and ethnic violence. The range of this book is staggering, from Gordimer''s first piece in The New Yorker in 1954, in which she autobiographically traces her emergence as a brilliant, young writer in a racist country, to her pioneering role in recognising the greatest African and European writers of her generation, to her truly, courageous stance in supporting Nelson Mandela and other members of the ANC during their years of imprisonment. Given that Gordimer will never write an autobiography, Telling Times is an important document of twentieth-century social and political history, told through the voice of one of its greatest literary figures.

Nadine Gordimer began her writing life at a relatively young age. In 1991, that life received the ultimate recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In this volume, Gordimer, who has been described by her peers as a formidable visitor from the future, the leviathan of South African letters and almost always as a gifted writer with extraordinary powers of observation, is paid homage by fellow writers from South Africa and other parts of the world. The book comprises readings, tributes, fiction, poetry, interviews and photographs which engage directly and indirectly with Gordimer''s work and her still unfolding legacy.

This work is another contribution to the growing pictorial record of apartheid in South Africa, and like some earlier series of black-and-white photographs it is haunted with pathos and irony. Like the pictures from Peter Magubane''s Magubane''s South Africa (LJ 5/15/78), Goldblatt''s images span 35 years and qualify as works of art in their own right.

"Superb...a series of masterly drawn glimpses into the storymaking art of one of Africa''s great modern literary geniuses." -Alan Cheuse, NPR A selection of short stories written to date by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer, Life Times reveals her acute understanding of human nature and paints a fascinatingly original portrait of South Africa. Whether focusing on politics, sexuality, race, love, or loss, Gordimer maps out the terrain of human relationships with razor-sharp psychological insight and a stunning lack of sentimentality. Complex and multifaceted, her stories challenge us, time and again, to examine the conflict between our actions and our unspoken desires. This powerful collection, which includes two new stories, is a testament to Gordimer''s literary genius and the ongoing power and relevance of her vision.

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, he is isolated from other people and he begins to question his work and the politics of South Africa.