This is an extraordinary collection of essays, articles, appreciations of fellow writers and addresses delivered over four decades, including Nadine Gordimer's Nobel Price Lecture of 1991.
We may examine here her evidence of the inequities 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 white 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 reassesses the role of the writer in the world today.