In this collection of new stories, Nadine Gordimer crosses the frontiers of politics, memory, sexuality, and love with the fearless insight that is the hallmark of her writing.

In the title story, a middle-aged academic who had been an anti-apartheid activist embarks on an unadmitted pursuit of the possibilities for his own racial identity in his great-grandfather’s fortune-hunting interlude of living rough on diamond diggings in South Africa, his young wife far away in London. “Dreaming of the Dead” conjures up a lunch in a New York Chinese restaurant where Susan Sontag and Edward Sa+>>d return in surprising new avatars as guests in the dream of a loving friend. The historian in “History” is a parrot who confronts people with the scandalizing voice reproduction of quarrels and clandestine love-talk on which it has eavesdropped. “Alternative Endings” considers the way writers make arbitrary choices in how to end stories–and offers three, each relating the same situation, but with a different resolution, arrived at by the three senses: sight, sound, and smell.

In Burger’s Daughter, Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer uses a coming-of-age story to explore the complicated political circumstances of modern South Africa.

Rosa Burger is a white South African woman in her early twenties trying to uphold the political heritage handed on by her martyred parents while carving out a sense of self. Cast in the revolutionary mold, the only survivor of a family known for their anti-apartheid beliefs and practices, Rosa is under the watch of the government and the rebels alike, all of whom seem to have great expectations of her. A quiet, private person, Rosa herself is more concerned with introspection and with trying to understand her identity and her political climate in her own way. Through her journey, the journey of a nation comes to light.

For years, it has been what is called a “deteriorating situation.” Now it is war. All over South Africa, cities are battlegrounds, and radio and television stations are under siege. Bam and Maureen Smales take up their servant July’s suggestion and drive with their children to his remote home village. For fifteen years, July has been the decently treated black servant, totally dependent on them. Now, he becomes their host, their savior, and their keeper. Suddenly facing a hunted life of bare subsistence, owing their survival to July, the Smales are forced to look at him and at one another in an entirely new light. They find life utterly changed and harboring different dread and hope for each individual.

Mehring, a rich, powerful and vital industrialist, has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer. But his possessions refuse to remain objects: his wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; and even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.

Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, paints a fascinating portrait of a man both reckless and calculating, a “conservationist” left only with the possibility of self-preservation, in this subtle and detailed study of the forces and relationships that seethed in South Africa.