Description

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

In ’70s’ South Africa, Rian Malan – descendant of the architects of apartheid, middle-class white boy, friend to blacks – went to work as a crime reporter for a local Johannesburg rag. There he encountered first-hand the horrors wrought by apartheid: the poverty, injustice and violence. After an eight-year exile, he returned to write this book. With gripping stories and in mesmerising prose, this is Malan’s attempt to understand his country, its racial hatred, and his own tortured conscience.

Publisher Review

Rian Malan has written a tragic masterpiece and a classic of our time * Time Out * My Traitor's Heart is a tremendous book about candour, honour and race, a witness-bearing act of the rarest courage. No one who reads it could ever forget it * Michael Herr * A tortured, mesmerising attempt to capture exactly the conflicts of [Malan's] upbringing, conflicts that went to the soul of the emerging nation. * Guardian * The remorseless exercise of a reporter's anguished conscience gives us a South Africa we thought we knew all about: but we knew nothing -- John Le Carre A great swirling devil of a book and it is equal in every way to its vast subject - the black and white country of the heart -- Don DeLillo