Get a life

Yona ke yona, Nadine Gordimer excels in this often detatched narrative that is a culmination of a lot of her writing on South Africa. Moving from a local to a global context, the book uses a family's crises (a serious illness of the son, affairs of the loves) to weave a story that seems more relevant now than it would have when published in 2005, highlighting the environmental crisis while keeping strong the undercurrent of recent apartheid politics. The writing flows like flooded valleys, and slows to stark, karst passages, usually distant when it seems it should be most intense. A beautifully constructed novel about modern times.