Back to home page - News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

not-for-profit - a workers'co-op - committed to social justice | 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY - 0151 708 7270

Get A Life

by Nadine Gordimer - £12.99  Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (2006)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9780747582427 | ISBN 10: 0747582424

Paul Bannerman, an ecologist in Africa, believes he controls the trajectory of his life, with the markers of vocation and marriage. But when he's diagnosed with thyroid cancer and prescribed treatment that makes him radioactive and for a period a danger to others, he questions, as Auden wrote, 'What authority gives / Existence its surprise.'
 
Taken in by his parents, businessman Adrian and successful lawyer Lyndsay, to protect his wife and child from radiation, back in his childhood garden he faces the contradiction between the values of his conservation work and those of his wife, an advertising agency executive.
 
While threats of projects to build a nuclear reactor and drain the country's vital wetlands preoccupy Paul, the strange state of his existence leads his mother to confront her own past.
 
With Paul cured and normality apparently returned, his parents take a holiday in Mexico to fulfil the archaeological vocatio his father missed. The consequence of this is the final surprise of passionate existences.

"Gordimer has undoubtedly become one of the World's Great Writers... her rootedness in a political time, place and faith has never dimmed her complex gifts as an artist."
(Independent)

(Price & availability last checked: May 2018)

This website can't tell you if we have this book in the shop or not - to ask, phone us or use the enquiry link below. (We can order most books within 7-10 days, subject to availability.)
  


In booklists: World Fiction - Africa, Writers by Surname - G,
In categories: World - Africa, Fiction,

© News From Nowhere Co-operative Ltd IP24524R 2004-2024 | Privacy policy | Contact | return to top of page