A Nobel Prize winner, an outspoken critic of apartheid, a frequently controversial public figure in her native South Africa, and one of the leading novelists of her age, Nadine Gordimer has been writing since her teens. Her first short story, written for children, was published when she was thirteen; her first story for adults appeared two years later, in 1939. Celebrated for the precision of her writing and the evocative accuracy of her depictions, she has been associated with a realistic technique since her earliest work. Her irony and accuracy produce compassionate indictments of the folly and tyranny of the apartheid state in which she lived since its inception in 1948. During the period of its dismantling and in the early years of the democratically elected nonracial government, she remained a recorder, both of the at-times violent dissolution of the old order and of the wasteful legacy of the years...