My Son's Story
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 First edition | |
| Author | Nadine Gordimer |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date | 1990 |
| Publication place | South Africa |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 277 pp |
| ISBN | 978-1439508930 |
My Son's Story is the ninth novel by South African novelist Nadine Gordimer. It was written towards the end of the State of Emergency and first published in 1990. The next year, Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Swedish Academy explicitly cited My Son's Story in their press release, calling it "ingenious and revealing and at the same time enthralling".[1]
My Son's Story tells the tale of a family torn apart by illicit love, political struggle and Apartheid. Sonny, an educated schoolteacher classed by South African law as Coloured, is slowly drawn into the struggle against the white regime. Unable to share this struggle with his family, he has an affair with the one person with whom he can talk, a white social worker. Unbeknownst to him, his family discovers the affair and are themselves drawn into the fight against Apartheid. Their lives were, in Gordimer's words, "determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against numbing cold."[2]
