House Gun - Paperback

by Nadine Gordimer (Author)

With the scaffolding of a courtroom drama and the moral underpinnings of the state's responsibility, the novel infuses an isolated crime of passion with the atmospheric pressure of a country reeling from its own past. --The Boston Sunday Globe

A house gun, like a house cat: a fact of ordinary daily life. How else can you defend yourself against intruders and thieves in post-apartheid South Africa? The respected executive director of an insurance company, Harald, and his doctor wife, Claudia, are faced with something that could never happen to them: Their son, Duncan, has murdered a man.

In this powerful and disturbing anatomy of a murder, Nadine Gordimer examines the effect of violence on the complicated web of love that holds together parents and children, friends and lovers.

Back Jacket

A house gun, like a house cat: a fact of ordinary life, today. How else can you defend yourself against losing your hi-fi equipment, your TV set and computer? The respected Executive Director of an insurance company, Harald, and his doctor wife, Claudia, are faced with something that could never happen to them: their son, Duncan, has committed murder. What kind of loyalty do a mother and father owe a son who has committed the unimaginable horror? How could he have ignored the sanctity of human life? What have they done to influence his character; how have they failed him? Nadine Gordimer's new novel is a passionate narrative of the complex manifestations of that final test of human relations we call love - between lovers of all kinds, and parents and children. It moves with the restless pace of living itself; if it is a parable of present violence, it is also an affirmation of the will to reconciliation that starts where it must, between individual men and women.

Author Biography

Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) was a Nobel Prize winner whose novels include the Booker Prize-winning The Conservationist, Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning The Pickup, and No Time Like the Present. Gordimer's short story collections include Loot and Jump and Other Stories. She also published literary and political essay collections such as Living in Hope and History.

Gordimer was a vice president of PEN International and an executive member of the Congress of South African Writers. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in Great Britain and a Commandeur of l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France).