No Time Like the Present - Softcover

Gordimer fashions a grand, state-of-her-nation novel about South Africa from Presidents Mandela to Zuma ... A mightily serious and impressive book * Daily Mail * Nadine Gordimer is a towering figure in South African literature, and, at 88, remains a vital, productive force * Metro * At best her free-style, high-velocity storytelling [Gordimer] delivers a visceral immediacy and intensity that lets us inhabit the minds, and share the views, of her characters with the minimum of novelistic fuss ... Written with a ferocious, high-definition attentiveness ... Gordimer, a nonpareil observer of the outer and inner life alike, sustains her heroic mission of witness and warning * Independent * A complex book and a pained examination of the difficulties posed by a freedom that was won by imperfect human beings * Guardian * This is a book of great thematic richness and quiet brilliance * Sunday Times * This is an important and highly topical book about how hard it is to sustain hope and idealism in the wake of a revolution ... Gordimer has written an angry, melancholy, brave book * Spectator *

Nadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks - with a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality, and an understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul - the inextricable link between personal life and political, communal history. The revelation of this theme in each new work, not only in her homeland South Africa, but the twenty-first century world, is evidence of her literary genius: in the sharpness of her psychological insights, the stark beauty of her language, the complexity of her characters and the difficult choices with which they are faced. In No Time Like the Present, Gordimer brings the reader into the lives of Steven Reed and Jabulile Gumede, a 'mixed' couple, both of whom have been combatants in the struggle for freedom against apartheid. Once clandestine lovers under racist law forbidding sexual relations between white and black, they are now in the new South Africa. The place and time where freedom - the 'better life for all' that was fought for and promised - is being created but also challenged by political and racial tensions, while the hangover of moral ambiguities and the vast and growing gap between affluence and mass poverty, continue to haunt the present. No freedom from personal involvement in these or in the personal intimacy of love. The subject is contemporary, but Gordimer's treatment is timeless. In No Time Like the Present, she shows herself once again a master novelist, at the height of her prodigious powers.