Beethoven Was One-sixteenth Black: and Other Stories - Tapa dura

'Nadine Gordimer is one of the best story-writers in English today.' Observer 'Gordimer's stark sentences and emotional depth make most modern fiction seem trivial.' The Times 'Gordimer has undoubtedly become one of the World's Great Writers ... her rootedness in a political time, place and faith has never dimmed her complex gifts as an artist.' Independent 'Nadine Gordimer writes of blacks and whites, but her steady, unblinking eye sees something grey there. You could call it human nature, and you would be right.' Daily Telegraph

A woman gauges the state of her marriage by the tone of her husband's cello; a wife reads her husband's mood by the scent in the nape of his neck; a newly emigrated couple are divided by visual obsession, he with his native Budapest, she with South African suburbia. There is lively conversation amongst recently departed literary luminaries in the Chinese restaurant of 'Dreaming of the Dead', and a widow seeks an incarnation of her husband that she never knew in life when she meets his former gay lover in 'Allesverloren'. In 'A Frivolous Woman', an old woman compromises not just her own, but others' safety escaping from war-time Germany, while the title story illuminates a new discrimination, where people seek to claim - not hide - a trace of 'the tar brush'. Nadine Gordimer moves seamlessly between personal and political worlds in this magnificent new collection of stories, ironic, passionate, humorous, a reminder to her countless admirers, and a taste for the uninitiated, of her enduring, ever fresh imaginative power.