Name: A Sport of Nature
ISBN: 9780140084702

Synopsis

"A moving, powerful book that, in a career rich with distinguished works, could well be considered her masterpiece."—Publishers Weekly

Hillela is Nadine Gordimer's "sport of nature": a spontaneous mutation, a new type of untainted person, she is seductive and intuitively gifted for life. A Sport of Nature is the bold, sweeping story of her rise from obscurity to an unpredictable kind of political power.

Abandoned by her mother, Hillela is left to be raised by her two aunts in South Africa. At Olga's she might have acquired a taste for antiques and a style of dress to please a suitable husband. At Pauline's she might have developed a social conscience. But Hillela's betrayal of her position as a surrogate daughter so shocks both families that at seventeen she is cast adrift.

Swiftly and perilously, her life opens out. She lives as a footloose girl among political exiles on a beach in East Africa, drifting between jobs and lovers, and finally becomes the wife of a black revolutionary. Personal tragedy is ultimately the catalyst for her political development, leading her into a heroic role in the overthrow of apartheid.

This is the largest, most reverberant work of fiction we have had yet from one of the world's master novelists.

Recommendations

The Conservationist

by Unknown

Head shares Gordimer's unflinching examination of race and power in Southern Africa, but from a Botswanan perspective that gives you a different angle on the same historical moment. Like Hillela, Head's protagonist is caught between worlds—neither fully belonging to the colonial establishment nor to the liberation movements—and the novel's sparse, almost mythic prose creates an intimacy that contrasts beautifully with Gordimer's more expansive narrative style.

View book

The remains of the day de Kazuo Ishiguro

by Gallix/François

This might seem like a departure—a quiet English country house instead of revolutionary Africa—but Ishiguro does something Gordimer also masters: he shows how personal choices become entangled with historical forces in ways the protagonist doesn't fully grasp until it's too late. Both novels use restraint as a narrative weapon, revealing the magnitude of what's been lost through what remains unsaid.

View book

Toni Morrison - Beloved

by Carl Plasa

Morrison's masterwork shares Gordimer's interest in how trauma reshapes identity and politics, but she layers in magical realism and deep psychological excavation that *A Sport of Nature* doesn't attempt. The way Morrison weaves personal tragedy into collective historical wounds—slavery's ongoing haunting of America—parallels how Gordimer uses Hillela's private suffering as a gateway to understanding apartheid's larger machinery.

View book

Ursula K. Le Guin's the Left Hand of Darkness (Modern Critical Interpretations)

by Unknown

Here's your surprise: Le Guin's science fiction novel operates as political philosophy disguised as adventure. Like Gordimer, she's fundamentally interested in how societies organize power and gender, and how an outsider's perspective can reveal what insiders take for granted. The alien world of Gethen becomes a thought experiment about the assumptions embedded in our own political systems—exactly what Gordimer does with apartheid South Africa.

View book

The Famished Road Man Booker Prize Winner

by Ben Okri

Okri's sprawling Nigerian epic shares Gordimer's ambition to capture a whole world in transformation, but he does it through magical realism and myth rather than social realism. Azaro's journey through a Lagos caught between tradition and modernity has the same sweeping scope as Hillela's arc, and both authors trust their readers to hold contradictions—the spiritual and the political, the personal and the historical—in tension simultaneously.

View book