Lyndall Gordon
Unweaving the Rainbow Nation
No Time Like the Present
By Nadine Gordimer
Bloomsbury 432pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
Absolution
By Patrick Flanery
Atlantic Books 389pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
Nadine Gordimer’s great oeuvre of stories and novels has been suffused with the issue of racial injustice. Her Nobel prize was awarded in 1991, the year after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. The ‘rainbow nation’ was born when Mandela’s high-minded ANC party took office in 1994.
Eighteen years into the new South Africa, Gordimer puts her long support to the test. No Time Like the Present follows the rainbow lives of a group of one-time freedom fighters for whom moral choices were once simple. Their voices in the present draw us into moral disturbance: the bribes
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