Synopses & Reviews
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. None to Accompany Me is arresting and reverbant - perhaps the most powerful novel to date by one of the world's most commanding writers.
Review
"It would be hard to find a more direct experience of the times through which South Africa has passed over the last forty years than in the intimate portrayals Ms. Gordimer has given us....There are no puppets in Ms. Gordimers work, no mouthpieces; her people are afforded the dignity of human vanity and complexity."---The New York Times Book Review "A sustaining achievement, proving Gordimer once again a lucid witness to her countrys transformation and a formidable interpreter of the inner self."---Chicago Tribune"A radical and complex novel, rich with the weight of story and the challenge of hard questions. Gordimer demonstrates again that when her imagination transforms experience, the result is a literature for the world."---San Francisco Chronicle"Nadine Gordimer brilliantly delivers individual personalities distorted or enriched by the workings of a collective will. There is no contemporary writer better armed than Gordimer---with fierce moral intelligence and artistic integrity."---Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"It would be hard to find a more direct experience of the times through which South Africa has passed over the last forty years than in the intimate portrayals Ms. Gordimer has given us....There are no puppets in Ms. Gordimers work, no mouthpieces; her people are afforded the dignity of human vanity and complexity."---The New York Times Book Review "A sustaining achievement, proving Gordimer once again a lucid witness to her countrys transformation and a formidable interpreter of the inner self."---Chicago Tribune"A radical and complex novel, rich with the weight of story and the challenge of hard questions. Gordimer demonstrates again that when her imagination transforms experience, the result is a literature for the world."---San Francisco Chronicle"Nadine Gordimer brilliantly delivers individual personalities distorted or enriched by the workings of a collective will. There is no contemporary writer better armed than Gordimer---with fierce moral intelligence and artistic integrity."---Chicago Sun-Times
Synopsis
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the YearIn None to Accompany Me, the Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer 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.
Synopsis
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. None to Accompany Me is arresting and reverbant - perhaps the most powerful novel to date by one of the world's most commanding writers.
About the Author
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), the recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in a small South African town. Her first book, a collection of stories, was published when she was in her early twenties. Her ten books of stories include Something Out There (1984), and Jump and Other Stories (1991). Her novels include The Lying Days (1953), A World of Strangers (1958), Occasion for Loving (1963), The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of Honour (1971), The Conservationist (1975), Burgers Daughter (1979), Julys People (1981), A Sport of Nature (1987), My Sons Story (1990), None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998), The Pickup (2001), Get a Life (2005), and No Time Like the Present (2012). A World of Strangers, The Late Bourgeois World, and Burgers Daughter were originally banned in South Africa. She published three books of literary and political essays: The Essential Gesture (1988); Writing and Being (1995), the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures she gave at Harvard in 1994; and Living in Hope and History (1999).Ms. Gordimer was a vice president of PEN International and an executive member of the Congress of South African Writers. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in Great Britain and an honorary member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was also a Commandeur deOrdre des Arts et des Lettres (France). She held fourteen honorary degrees from universities including Harvard, Yale, Smith College, the New School for Social Research, City College of New York, the University of Leuven in Belgium, Oxford University, and Cambridge University.Ms. Gordimer won numerous literary awards, including the Booker Prize for The Conservationist, both internationally and in South Africa.