My Son's Story

When Will skips school to slip off to a movie theater near Johannesburg, he is shocked to see his father. An ordinary mishap, but his father is no ordinary man. He is a "colored" and revered anti-apartheid hero, and his female companion is a white activist fiercely dedicated to the cause. As Will struggles with confusion and bitterness, My Son's Story unravels the consequences of one man's infidelity as a new South Africa violently emerges from the apartheid.

"Captures with convincing detail the ecstatic rewards and terrifying costs of revolutionary politics...Delineates with unblinking candor the collision of public and private experience that takes place on a daily basis in South Africa...A fiercely intelligent novel -- one of her most powerful yet." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Gordimer has taken South Africa's tragedy and laid the truth of it in our laps. The story she tell sis lucid and achingly alive."--The Boston Sunday Globe

"Beautifully felt, both in its anger and its compassion...It is so rich as to make praise superfluous, so vital and disturbing as to send us...back into the world with a heightened sense of what life in it might mean."--USA Today


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; she went on to publish more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction.

Her novels include the Booker Prize-winning The Conservationist, Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning The Pickup, and No Time Like the Present. A World of Strangers, The Late Bourgeois World, and the award-winning Burger's Daughter were originally banned in South Africa. Gordimer's short story collections include Loot , Jump and Other Stories, and Something Out There. She also published literary and political essay collections such as The Essential Gesture; Writing and Being, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures she gave at Harvard in 1994; and Living in Hope and History.

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 of l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France). She held fourteen honorary degrees from universities including Harvard, Yale, the University of Leuven in Belgium, Oxford University, and Cambridge University.