HOUSE GUN - Softcover

"Elegantly conceived, flawlessly executed . . . Gordimer tells a love story unlike any other I have ever read." --Jack Miles, The New York Times Book Review

"As the moral anatomy of a murder, The House Gun will seem to American readers closer to their own existence than many Gordimer books." --The Washington Post

"An intellectual thriller with a soap opera engine . . . Nothing short of epic." --The Baltimore Sun

"A memorable blend of the topical and the timeless, at once a profound, lingering meditation on the human heart and a story so gripping you can scarcely bear to put it down." --San Francisco Chronicle

"It feels like the reworking of pages from the notebook of an excellent journalist, an observer sitting for the first time on the Court's press benches and recording the historic scene as human rights are finally incorporated into South African supreme law." --Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books

"As complex, compelling, and memorable an account of race and class as any of her earlier works . . . A brilliant, beautifully crafted novel of betrayal." --The Dallas Morning News

"The House Gun is like a well-cut diamond. Its many angles and planes catch the light and illuminate understanding, laying bare the emotions of a people caught in the transition from one world to another." --The Orlando Sentinel

"Gordimer is a major literary figure, working at the peak of her craft . . . The House Gun is an awe-inspiring work." --The Cincinnati News and Observer

"Exquisitely drawn . . . Passionately intelligent, it's more complicated than any detective story. Complicated not so much by plot, it's about the mystery of the human heart, the 'mystery that is the other individual, even the one you have created out of your own flesh.'" --Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

"A passionately schematic moral anatomy of a murder." --Kirkus

"With the scaffolding of a courtroom drama and the moral underpinnings of the state's responsibility, the novel infuses an isolated crime of passion with the atmospheric pressure of a country reeling from its own past." --The Boston Sunday Globe
A house gun, like a house cat: a fact of ordinary daily life. How else can you defend yourself against intruders and thieves in post-apartheid South Africa? The respected executive director of an insurance company, Harald, and his doctor wife, Claudia, are faced with something that could never happen to them: Their son, Duncan, has murdered a man. In this powerful and disturbing anatomy of a murder, Nadine Gordimer examines the effect of violence on the complicated web of love that holds together parents and children, friends and lovers.