Book description
Nadine Gordimer's first novel, published in 1953, tells the story of Helen Shaw, daughter of white middle-class parents in a small gold-mining town in South Africa. As Helen comes of age, so does her awareness grow of the African life around her. Her involvement, as a bohemian student, with young…
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Why read it?
1 author picked The Lying Days as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I stumbled across this coming-of-age story by one of my favourite South African writers in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford when I was an undergraduate. I hadn’t been able to lose myself in fiction for a couple of years because I was so immersed in academic reading (history, mostly) – but this novel got me back on the wagon. It was the first novel I’d read in a long time that really made me want to write, to tell a story that could move a reader in the same way. In it, a white, middle-class girl growing up in a…
From Trilby's list on The best books about smart girls figuring out hard stuff.
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