Cry, the Beloved Country: A Story of Comfort in Desolation

Paton, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743262174 ISBN 13: 9780743262170

Publisher: Scribner, 2003

"Cry, the Beloved Country" is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s. The book is written with such keen empathy and understanding that to read it is to share fully in the gravity of the characters' situations. It both touches your heart deeply and inspires a renewed faith in the dignity of mankind. "Cry, the Beloved Country" is a classic tale, passionately African, timeless and universal, and beyond all, selfless.

Review:

"A beautiful novel, rich, firm and moving...its writing is so fresh, its projection of character so immediate and full, its events so compelling, and its understanding so compassionate that to read the book is to share intimately, even to the point of catharsis, in the grave human experience."--The New York Times

"The greatest novel to emerge out of the tragedy of South Africa, and one of the best novels of our time."--The New Republic

"We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poets, almost all thin. In Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country the statesman, the poet, and the novelist meet in a unique harmony."--Literary Critic Lewis Gannett

Book Description:

First published in 1948, Cry The Beloved Country stands as the single most important novel in twentieth-century South African literature.