Throughout her 50-year career, Nadine Gordimer has maintained a fierce affinity to the short story, declaring it 'the form of the age'. Using a mode of oblique allegory, the Nobel Laureate broaches the largest of themes through small, elusive episodes. In the title story, a white former apartheid activist begins a search for a hidden black ancestry. The desire to establish an identity through family history is key to the collection. In other tales, a widow seeks out her ex-husband's gay lover, and a daughter questions her paternity. The characters' wilful acts of retrieval are continually undercut - and occasionally admonished - by Gordimer's spare narrative voice: 'Caches of old papers are graves, you shouldn't open them.'


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