Truer than Fiction

Nadine Gordimer is one of South Africa's most prominent authors. In 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. TRUER THAN FICTION charts this iconic writer's post-apartheid work, focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on the four novels she published between 1994 and 2005: NONE TO ACCOMPANY ME (1994), THE HOUSE GUN (1998), THE PICKUP (2001), and GET A LIFE (2005). The study includes a brief biographical outline of Gordimer's life and a discussion of her long-standing status as 'the voice' of South Africa. It also provides the contemporary socio-historical and literary contexts for her work after the country's first democratic elections in 1994. The core of the study constitutes a thematic assessment of Gordimer's fiction and non- fiction after 1994, explored in the light of these contexts. Drawing upon such schools of thought as postcolonial theory, cultural studies, ecocriticism, feminist criticism and gender studies, as well as the rich critical reception of her writing, TRUER THAN FICTION illuminates the continued importance of Nadine Gordimer's oeuvre in her home country and across the world.