The House Gun A Novel [Paperback]

With the scaffolding of a courtroom drama and the moral underpinnings of the state's responsibility, the novel infuses an isolated crime of passion with the atmospheric pressure of a country reeling from its own past. --The Boston Sunday Globe
A house gun, like a house cat: a fact of ordinary daily life. How else can you defend yourself against intruders and thieves in post-apartheid South Africa? The respected executive director of an insurance company, Harald, and his doctor wife, Claudia, are faced withsomething that could never happen to them: Their son, Duncan, has murdered a man. In this powerful and disturbing anatomy of a murder, Nadine Gordimer examines the effect of violence on the complicated web of love that holds together parents and children, friends and lovers.

Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) was a Nobel Prize winner whose novels include the Booker Prize-winningThe Conservationist, Commonwealth Writers Prize-winningThe Pickup, andNo Time Like the Present. Gordimers short story collections includeLootandJump and Other Stories. She also published literary and political essay collections such asLiving in Hope and History.

Gordimer was a vice president of PEN International and an executive member of the Congress of South African Writers. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in Great Britain and a Commandeur of lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres (France).

Elegantly conceived, flawlessly executed . . . Gordimer tells a love story unlike any other I have ever read. Jack Miles, The New York Times Book Review

As the moral anatomy of a murder,The House Gunwill seem to American readers closer to their own existence than many Gordimer books. The Washington Post

An intellectual thriller with a soap opera engine . . . Nothing short of epic. The Baltimore Sun

A memorable blend of the topical and the timeless, at once a pl³"