Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature, is one of today's most talented prose-fiction writers. This powerful collection of short stories, set in her native Southern Africa, reveals her outstanding ability to pierce the core of the human condition of those, both black and white, living in countries where repression and coercion is the norm. Although Gordimer illustrates vividly the subtleties of her characters' emotions, there is always the awareness of the larger canvas, the turmoil of a violent world outside the individual incidents, where the instability of fear and uncertainty lead unwittingly to crimes of conscience.