Nadine Gordimer, Nobel laureate and Booker Prize winner, is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks - with a clear-eyed fierceness, a lack of sentimentality, and a deep understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul - her eternal themes: the inextricable link between personal and communal history; the inescapable moral ambiguities of daily life; the political and racial tensions which persist in her homeland, South Africa. And in each new work is fresh evidence of her literary genius: in the sharpness of her psychological insights; the stark beauty of her language, the complexity of her characters and the difficult choices with which they are faced. In No Time Like the Present, Gordimer trains her keen eye on her native country and what has become of it since Mandela's jubilant release from prison. At the heart of her story is an interracial couple, Steve and Jabulile, living in a newly - tentatively - free South Africa, he a university lecturer she a lawyer, both comrades in the Struggle and now parents of children born in freedom. There is nothing so extraordinary about their lives, and yet, in telling their story, and the stories of their friends and families, Gordimer manages to capture the tortured, fragmented essence of a nation struggling to define itself in the post-apartheid world of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. The subject is contemporary, but Gordimer's treatment is, as ever, timeless. No Time Like the Present is a powerful state of the nation novel with a very human heart.

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