None to Accompany me - Tapa blanda

In an extraordinary period immediately before the first non-racial election and the beginning of majority rule in South Africa, Vera Stark, the protagonist of Nadine Gordimer's passionate new novel, weaves a ruthless interpretation of her own past into her participation in the present as a lawyer representing blacks in the struggle to reclaim the land. The return of exiles is transforming the city, and through the lives of Didymus Maqoma, his wife Sibongile, and their lovely daughter who cannot even speak her parents' African language, the reader experiences the strange passions, reversals, and dangers that accompany new-won access to power. All must change: Didymus, once a major actor in the resistance, making way for Sibongile's emergence as a political figure; Vera, working through the consequences of a lifetime's commitments to a new kind of relationship with a new man of the times, Zeph Rapulana.

Nadine Gordimer is the author of eleven previous novels, as well as collections of stories and essays. She has received many awards, including the Booker Prize (for The Conservationist in 1974) and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.