A worldwide best-seller when it was first published in 1948, Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law is a work of searing beauty.
Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu pastor, and his son, Absalom. Set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s, it is also the story of a land and a people driven by racial injustice. The book is written with such keen compassion and understanding that the listener shares fully in the gravity of the characters' situations.
Paton said of his book: "It is a song of love for one's far distant country." Thus, it is a tale that is passionately African while also being timeless and universal. Ultimately, Cry, the Beloved Country is a work of love and hope, of courage and tragedy, born of the dignity of man.
Reviews
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This moving and apparently timeless novel is as fresh and powerful as it was upon its first release in 1948. Its Zulu hero, Stephen Kumalo, a modest and very provincial Anglican priest, goes to Johannesburg to find his sister, gone to the bad in the big city, and his only child, Absolom, about whom there will be worse news. The marvelous British actor Michael York brings the white South Africans, with their idealism, their prejudices, and their own provinciality, vividly to life. His native African characters, perhaps inevitably, sound more Anglo than tribal, but it makes small difference. With the haunting, incantatory rhythms of its language and the human complexity of its story, this is a polished, elegant production of a true classic. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
New York Times...
“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 treated.”
About the Author
ALAN PATON (1903-1988), South African novelist and humanitarian worker, was born in 1903 in Pietermaritzburg in the province of Natal, South Africa. After attending Pietermaritzburg College and Natal University, he taught school for three years in the rural village of Ixopo, the setting for Cry, the Beloved Country.
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