"This is a novel of enormous power' New Statesman 'Gordimer is a great writer ... It is Turgenev that she most brings to mind' -- New York Review of Books The Booker Prize winning political novel by the Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Gordimer Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.

Product Description Glady's Sperber remains home as one by one her younger brothers and sisters marry and move out, but finally, at sixty, she decides to marry From Publishers Weekly Originally published in England in 1960, this is a bleak rendition of a mother/daughter love/hate relationship by the Booker Prize-winning author (see review of Our Father below). Gladys Sperber, the family "martyr," is the oldest of five "failures" who, because her mother is "too busy," virtually raises her siblings. "She would take her food when the others had eaten. . . . She would wait for their happiness before she felt entitled to her own, and she would have looked after their dying if she'd been able." The title refers to Gladys's destructive symbiotic relationship with her mother: the biblical book of Ezekiel observes that fathers eat sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. Although the novel, which covers two world wars, evokes the limited choices available to women in a man's world and is replete with manifestations of mother-daughter interdependence (an adult Gladys shares a bedroom with her widowed mother), it doesn't probe the psychodynamics of that relationship. The result is a contrived work that depresses rather than engrosses. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.