With consummate artistry, Nadine Gordimer illuminates the show-downs, standoffs and highlights of human intimacy while penetrating the nuances of immigration, national identity and race.
A woman gauges the state of her marriage by the tone of her husband's cello; a wife reads her husband's mood by the scent in the nape of his neck; a newly emigrated couple are divided by visual obsession, he with his native Budapest, she with South African suburbia.
There is lively conversation amongst recently departed literary luminaries in the Chinese restaurant of Dreaming of the Dead, and a widow seeks an incarnation of her husband that she never knew in life when she meets his former gay lover in Allesverloren. In A Frivolous Woman, an old woman compromises not just her own, but others' safety escaping from war-time Germany, while the title story illuminates a new discrimination, where people seek to claim - not hide - a trace of the 'tar brush'.
Nadine Gordimer moves seamlessly between personal and political worlds in this magnificent new collection of stories, ironic, passionate, humorous, a reminder to her countless admirers, and a taste for the uninitiated, of her enduring, ever fresh imaginative power.
