A sport of nature - Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer's novels and stories are acclaimed worldwide not only for the exceptional quality of her writing but for her depth of feeling and political insight. Now she breaks new ground both theratically and artistically, giving us a novel that treats 2 20th-century problem of the most profound

seriousness and proportions. With bold, ironic sweep,

Gordimer portrays a white woman - seductive and intuitively gifted at life - whose astonishing role in the affairs of the Africa to which she belongs no one, least of all herself, could have predicted The woman is Hillela, whom we first meet as an adolescent. Abandoned by her mother, who has run off to Mozambique with 'another man', she travels with her sales rep father to platteland towns leaves a Rhodesian girls' boarding-school in dis- grace, and eventually is given over to the care of one or another of her aunts. At Olga's she might have acquired a taste for antiques and a style of dress to please a suitable husband. At Pauline's she might have developed a social conscience. But Hillela's betrayal of her position as surrogate daughter so shocks both families that at seventeen she is cast adrift, her life swiftly and perilously opening out. To some, she is a problem child; to others, she is the beloved, an adventuress, an opportunist. People see in her what they will, but they are baffled as well. Is she an innocent, grasping for survival, or a seeker after power, finding her own way out of the deadly 'advantages' of being born a white South African? We see her as a footloose girl among political exiles on a beach in East Africa; as the unconven- tionally indispensable member of an ambassador's household; as the wife of a South African black revolutionary in Ghana in the 1960s. Personal tragedy becomes the catalyst for her political development, taking her to London, Eastern Europe, the United States, and, always, back to Africa. Her experience of people and events is a journey through the continent's struggle Contains natural foxing

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