Nadine Gordimer Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Lying Days (1953)
  2. A World of Strangers (1958)
  3. An Occasion for Loving (1963)
  4. The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
  5. A Guest of Honour (1970)
  6. The Conservationist (1974)
  7. Burger’s Daughter (1979)
  8. July’s People (1981)
  9. A Sport of Nature (1987)
  10. My Son’s Story (1990)
  11. None to Accompany Me (1994)
  12. The House Gun (1998)
  13. The Pickup (2001)
  14. Get a Life (2005)
  15. No Time Like the Present (2012)

Collections

  1. The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952)
  2. Six Feet of the Country (1956)
  3. Not for Publication (1965)
  4. Livingstone’s Companions (1970)
  5. Selected Stories (1975)
  6. No Place Like (1978)
  7. A Soldier’s Embrace (1980)
  8. Something Out There (1984)
  9. Jump (1991)
  10. Why Haven’t You Written? (1992)
  11. Ten (1996)
  12. Loot (2003)
  13. Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2007)
  14. Life Times (2010)

Anthologies edited

  1. Telling Tales (2004)

Non fiction

  1. Writing and Being (1995)
  2. Living in Hope and History (1999)
  3. Telling Times (2010)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Nadine Gordimer Books Overview

A World of Strangers

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.

A Guest of Honour

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.

The Conservationist

The winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature paints a fascinating portrait of a ‘conservationist’ left only with the possibility of self preservation, a subtle and detailed study of the forces and relationships that seethe in South Africa today. 6 cassettes.

Burger’s Daughter

In this 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.

July’s People

For 15 years, July has been the decently treated black servant in a South African household. Now, in ‘the deteriorating situation,’ the roles must reverse as he becomes the former master’s family’s host, their savior their keeper. 4 cassettes.

A Sport of Nature

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.

My Son’s Story

Playing truant, Will slips off to a movie theatre near Johannesburg and is shocked to see his father there with a woman he doesn’t know. The father is a ‘colored’ schoolteacher who has become a hero in the struggle against apartheid; his companion is a white activist fiercely dedicated to the cause. ‘A bold, unnerving tour de force.’ The New York Times Book Review.

None to Accompany Me

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 in the present as a lawyer representing blacks in the struggle to reclaim the land. The return of exiles is transforming the city, and through the lives of Didymus Maqoma, his wife Sibongile, and their lovely daughter who cannot even speak her parents’ African language, the listener experiences the strange passions, reversals, and dangers that accompany new won access to power.

The House Gun

A house gun kept like a house cat: a fact of ordinary life at the end of this century where violence is in the air. With that gun the architect son of Harald and Claudia has committed what is to them the unimaginable act shot dead the intimate friend he discovered making love to his woman. And the relationship between the three is revealed to have unimaginable meaning…
.

How has Duncan come to abandon the sanctity of human life they taught him? What kind of loyalty do parents owe a self confessed murderer? In post apartheid South Africa the defense of their son’s life is in the hands of a black man: Hamilton Motsamai, a flamboyant, distinguished advocate returned from political exile. The balance of everything in the parents’ world is turned upside down.

The House Gun is a passionate narrative of that final text of complex human relations we call love, moving from the intimate to the general condition. 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.

The Pickup

The Nobel Laureate’s psychologically penetrating story of the love affair between a rich South African and the illegal alien she ‘picks up’ on a whimWho picked up whom? Is The Pickup the illegal immigrant desperate to evade deportation to his impoverished desert country? Or is The Pickup the powerful businessman’s daughter trying to escape a priveleged background she despises? When Julie Summers’ car breaks down in a sleazy street, at a garage a young Arab emerges from beneath the chassis of a vehicle to aid her. The consequences develop as a story of unpredictably relentless emotions that overturn each one’s notion of the other, and of the solutions life demands for different circumstances. She insists on leaving the country with him. The love affair becomes a marriage that state she regards as a social convention appropriate to her father’s set and her mother remarried in California, but decreed by her ‘grease monkey’ in order to present her respectably to his family. In the Arab village, while he is dedicated to escaping, again, to what he believes is a fulfilling life in the West, she is drawn by a counter magnet of new affinities in his close family and the omnipresence of the desert. A novel of great power and concision, psychological surprises and unexpected developments, The Pickup is a story of the rites of passage that are emigration/immigration, where love can survive only if stripped of all certainties outside itself.

Get a Life

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, for a period a danger to others, he begins to question, as Auden wrote, ‘what Authority gives / existence its surprise.’In the garden of his childhood home, where his businessman father, Adrian, and prominent civil rights lawyer mother, Lyndsay, take him in to protect his wife and child from radiation, he enters an unthinkable existence and another kind of illumination: the contradiction between the values of his work and those of his wife, Benni, an ad agency executive. His mother is transformed by the strange state of her son’s existence to face her own past. Meanwhile, projects to build a nuclear reactor and drain vital wetlands preoccupy Paul as if he were at work. By the time he is cured, both families have been changed. On his return to his home and career, his parents go to Mexico to fulfill the archaeological vocation Adrian sacrificed to support his family. The consequence of this trip is the final surprise in this extraordinary exploration of passionate individual existences.

Six Feet of the Country

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.

Selected Stories

In these stories, selected by Gordimer herself, characters from every corner of society come to life, along with the South African landscape they inhabit. The stories have a strong focus on racial issues, yet their implications are universal. The stories are National Curriculum recommended reading.

A Soldier’s Embrace

A collection of short stories exploring the emotional and physical landscapes of South Africa.

Jump

In sixteen new 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.

Loot

Masterly new fiction from the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature

A startling new work: ten fictions, each a revelation of our interior lives, each entering unforeseen contexts of our contemporary world. In the title story, an earthquake exposes both an ocean bed strewn with treasure among the dead and the avarice of the town’s survivors. In ‘The Diamond Mine,’ a woman recalls her youthful surreptitious sexual initiation, while she and her parents chauffeured a young soldier to his wartime embarkation. The anopleles mosquito brings death to the saunas and other playgrounds of the developed world in ‘The Emissary.’ ‘Mission Statement’ is the story of a development agency official’s idealism, the ghosts of colonial history, and a love affair with a government official that ends astoundingly. ‘The Generation Gap’ turns the ‘gap’ upside down when a father’s bid for freedom shocks his adult children. In ‘Homage,’ one of Europe’s aliens visits the grave of the politician he was paid to assassinate. In ‘Karma,’ Gordimer’s inventiveness knows no bounds: in five returns to the earthly life, taking on different ages and genders, a disembodied narrator testifies to unfinished business–critically, wittily–and questions the nature of existence.

Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

‘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 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.

Life Times

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.

Telling Tales

Rarely have world writers of such variety and distinction appeared together in the same anthology. Their stories capture the range of emotions and situations of our human universe: tragedy, comedy, fantasy, satire, dramas of sexual love and of war in different continents and cultures. They are not about HIV / AIDS. But all twenty one writers have given their stories chosen by themselves as representing some of the best of their lifetime work as storytellers without any fee or royalty. Telling Tales is being published in more than twelve countries. The publisher’s profits from the sales of this book will go to HIV / AIDS preventive education and for medical treatment for people living with the suffering this pandemic infection brings to our contemporary world. So when you buy this unique anthology of renowned storytellers as a gift or for your own reading pleasure, you are also making a gift to combat the plague of our new millennium.

Writing and Being

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 place: 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 be: 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.

Living in Hope and History

Few writers have so consistently taken stock of the society in which they have lived. In a letter to fellow Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe, Nadine Gordimer describes this impressive volume as ‘a modest book of some of the non fiction 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, appreciations of fellow writers and addresses delivered over four decades, including her Nobel Prize Lecture of 1991. We may examine here Nadine Gordimer’s evidence of the inequities of Apartheid as she saw them in 1959, her shocking account of the bans on literature still in effect in the mid 1970s, through to South Africa’s emergence in 1994 as a country free at last, a view from the queue on that first day blacks and whites voted together plus updates on subsequent events. Gordimer’s canvas is global and her themes wide ranging. She examines the impact of technology on our expanding world view, the convergence of the moral and the political in fiction and she reas*sesses the role of the writer in the world today.

Telling Times

An extraordinary achievement, Telling Times reflects the true spirit of the writer as a literary beacon, moral activist, and political visionary. Never before has Gordimer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, published such a comprehensive collection of her nonfiction. Telling Tales represents the full span of her works in that field from the twilight of white rule in South Africa to the fight to overthrow the apartheid regime, and most recently, her role over the past seven years in confronting the contemporary phenomena of violence and the dangers of HIV. The range of this book is staggering, and the work in totality celebrates the lively perseverance of the life loving individual in the face of political tumult, then the onslaught of a globalized world. The abiding passionate spirit that informs A South African Childhood, a youthful autobiographical piece published in The New Yorker in 1954, can be found in each of the book’s ninety one pieces that span a period of fifty five years. Returning to a lifetime of nonfiction work has become an extraordinary experience for Gordimer. She takes from one of her revered great writers, Albert Camus, the conviction that the writer is a responsible human being attuned not alone to dedication to the creation of fiction but to the political vortex that inevitably encompas*ses twentieth and twenty first century life. Born in 1923, Gordimer, who as a child was ambitious to become a ballet dancer, was recognized at fifteen as a writing prodigy. Her sensibility was as much shaped by wide reading as it was to eye opening sight, passing on her way to school the grim labor compounds where black gold miners lived. These twin decisives literature and politics infuse the book, which includes historic accounts of the political atmosphere, firsthand, after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto uprising of 1976, as well as incisive close up portraits of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, among others. Gordimer revisits the eternally relevant legacies of Tolstoy, Proust, and Flaubert, and engages vigorously with contemporaries like Susan Sontag, Octavio Paz, and Edward Said. But some of her most sensuous writing comes in her travelogues, where the politics of Africa blend seamlessly with its awe inspiring nature including spectacular recollections of childhood holidays beside South Africa s coast of the Indian Ocean and a riveting account of her journey the length of the Congo River in the wake of Conrad. Gordimer s body of work is an extraordinary vision of the world that harks back to the sensibilities political, moral, and social of Dickens and Tolstoy, but with a decidedly vivid contemporary consciousness. Telling Times becomes both a literary exploration and extraordinary document of social and political history in our times.

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