THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD, by Nadine Gordimer

Stumbling upon a Nobel Prize-winning author for the first time is always interesting. I found Nadine Gordimer's short novel The Late Bourgeois World , written in 1966, to be a good book. It's very spare  yet nicely narrated with a strong sense of character, particularly the narrator. The mid-1960s world of Gordimer's South Africa, seen through the eyes of a sympathetic liberal white woman is very vividly portrayed. And it's got to have one of the all-time great titles of any book anywhere. Gordimer's an author worth reading, and had a story worth telling. I appreciated the open-endedness of the book, and her restraint as a writer to not wrap-up the story too neatly. The strategy fits the theme perfectly.

For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/1966/09/11/books/gordimer-bourg.html?_r=0