Cry, The Beloved Country

A good friend of mine recommended this book saying that it was one of the best books he had ever read. Published in 1948 it is set in South Africa and deals directly with its racial problems. Centred on a rural black pastor's search for his son in Johannesburg the novel works at a number of different levels dealing with faith, fatherhood, families, race, industry, rural and city life, tradition and"progress" etc. Two fathers, one black and one white, are brought together because of the deaths of their sons - sons who have gone in very different directions to their parents - living in an alien world that their parents have not trained them for. Through their sons deaths their fathers begin to look on the world in new ways.