About this item
Highlights
- A classic of literary nonfiction, My Traitor's Heart has been acclaimed as a masterpiece by readers around the world.
- Author(s): Rian Malan
- 368 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Political
Description
About the Book
Malan, former South African crime reporter, searches for the truth behind apartheid, and finds it not in the way blacks and whites live, but in the way they die at one another's hands.Book Synopsis
A classic of literary nonfiction, My Traitor's Heart has been acclaimed as a masterpiece by readers around the world. Rian Malan is an Afrikaner, scion of a centuries-old clan and relative of the architect of apartheid, who fled South Africa after coming face-to-face with the atrocities and terrors of an undeclared civil war between the races. This book is the searing account of his return after eight years of uneasy exile. Armed with new insight and clarity, Malan explores apartheid's legacy of hatred and suffering, bearing witness to the extensive physical and emotional damage it has caused to generations of South Africans on both sides of the color line. Plumbing the darkest recesses of the white and black South African psyches, Malan ultimately finds his way toward the light of redemption and healing. My Traitor's Heart is an astonishing book -- beautiful, horrifying, profound, and impossible to put down.
Review Quotes
Praise for My Traitor's Heart
"A tremendous book about candor, honor, and race, a witness-bearing act of the rarest courage. No one who reads it could ever forget it." --Michael Herr
"Here is truth-telling at its most exemplary and courageous. The remorseless exercise of a reporter's anguished conscience gives us a South Africa we thought we knew all about: but we knew nothing." --John le Carr
"Rian Malan is a master of landscape and a master of narrative, with a gift of living language that bubbles up from a full heart and an active mind." --V.S. Naipaul
"Malan is bent on uncovering another level altogether of South African life, and he does so beautifully... He sharply expands our understanding of his strange, strange country's complexities." --William Finnegan, The New York Times
"My Traitor's Heart grips you by the throat and won't let go." --Peter Gorner, The Chicago Tribune
"A passionate, blazingly honest testament... Those who read it will never again see South Africa in quite the same way." --Christopher Hope, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Rian Malan could always see the story when others had long since lost the plot. Sometimes he went completely off his head as he drew out the fugitive detail, digging in dirt for a diamond, shaking up the grievously overlooked. He tried to escape the word. He went fishing for five years, trying to hide from the relentlessly pursuing plot, but to no avail. When it comes to writing, Malan is dangerously good and there is no getting away." --Lin Sampson
"A book that is part investigative reportage, part personal confession, and in all respects remarkable... Penetrating, comprehensive, and-in its relentless accumulation of ghastly detail-heartbreaking." --Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
"Here, as in nothing I've read before, is the demotic voice of black and Afrikaner South Africa... Triumphant." --Salman Rushdie
"An unflinching and intimate story of a man fighting against injustice in his homeland, even as he must come to terms with his own family's poisonous role there." --Austin Merrill, Vanity Fair