
When Rain Clouds Gather
1968 · 186 pages
Makhaya crosses out of apartheid South Africa into a Botswana village and joins a cooperative, working against drought and a chief who needs the poor to stay poor. Head was a refugee herself.
★ 5.5

Makhaya crosses out of apartheid South Africa into a Botswana village and joins a cooperative, working against drought and a chief who needs the poor to stay poor. Head was a refugee herself.

Twenty-seven years in apartheid South Africa's prisons, set down without self-pity by the man who opened negotiations with his jailers from inside and then governed the country that had caged him.

David Lurie loses his professorship over an affair with a student and retreats to his daughter's farm in the new South Africa, where three men arrive. Coetzee offers no comfort and no absolution.