July's People
Nadine Gordimer
When revolution comes, the servant shelters his masters.
Written under apartheid but set in an imagined near future of armed revolution, it follows the white Smales family who flee Johannesburg and shelter in the village of their servant, July, where the master-servant order quietly inverts. Gordimer dissected liberal white dependence and self-deception with rare candour. The novel became a central text of the apartheid endgame and a fixture of South African syllabuses.
Its legacy. Gordimer received the Nobel Prize in 1991.
- Author
- Nadine Gordimer
- First published
- 1981
- Genre
- Novel
- Theme
- East, Southern and North African Literature
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