July's People | Suggested Reading

July's People What Do I Read Next?

Gordimer won the Booker Prize for her 1974 novel The Conservationist. The novel fictionalizes the consciousness of the agricultural settlers in South Africa and sets up the question being answered in Burger's Daughter and July's People. The question is, what role will whites have in the future of South Africa?

Burger's Daughter, also by Gordimer (1979), won several awards but was banned in South Africa. It is the story of a woman very much the opposite of Maureen Smales. She is Rosa Burger, the daughter of Lionel Burger (a fictionalization of Abram Fischer-a very prominent leader of the South African Communist Party), whose self-liberation from familial restraints requires acceptance of her political inheritance and challenges apartheid. One of the sources for this novel was Joe Slovo's 1976 essay, "South Africa-No Middle Road".

July's People has often been compared to Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), by J.IN. Coetzee, because...
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