Nadine Gordimer's Booker Prize-winning story of the forces and relationships seething in the South Africa of the day

A terrifyingly plausible vision.

When Paul Bannerman, an ecologist in Africa, is diagnosed with cancer and prescribed treatment that makes him radioactive, his fragile existence makes him question his life. 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.

A collection of stories from Nobel and Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer, this collection illustrates the showdowns, stand-offs and highlights of human intimacy while penetrating the nuances of immigration, national identity and race.

Throughout her career the internationally renowned South African writer Nadine Gordimer has built a literary reputation with her incisive short stories as much as with her acclaimed novels. This title is a collection of her stories.

At the heart of this story is an interracial couple, Steven and Jabulile, living in a 'free' South Africa. He is a university lecturer and she is a lawyer, both comrades in the Struggle and now parents of children born in freedom.

Liz Van Den Sandt's ex-husband, Max, an ineffectual rebel, has drowned himself. In prison for an act of violence against the government, he had betrayed his colleagues. Now Liz has been asked to perform a service for the Black Nationalist movement, at considerable danger to herself. Can she take the risk?

Jessie and Tom Stilwell keep open house. The impact on their home of Boaz Davis and his wife Ann, arrived from England, and Giedon Shibalo, the Stillwells' 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.

A bold, sweeping story of one girl's rise from obscurity to an unpredictable kind of political power Abandoned 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...

A child of a Jewish family fleeing Nazi-Germany and settling in apartheid South Africa in the 1930s, Ruth Weiss' journalistic career starts in Johannesburg of the 1950s. In 1968 banned from her home country, and then also from Rhodesia for her critical investigative journalism, she starts reporting from Lusaka, London and Cologne on virtually all issues which affect the newly independent African countries. Peasants and national leaders in southern Africa - Ruth Weiss met them all, traveling through Africa at a time when it was neither usual for a woman to do so, nor to report for economic...