My Son's Story

The son of an anti-apartheid activist discovers his father's shocking secret in the Nobel laureate's "bold, unnerving tour de force" (Robert Coles, The New York Times Book Review). 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