Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

It’s so quiet I could almost believe I can hear the stars in their courses — a vibrant, infinitely high-pitched hum, what used to be referred to as ‘the music of the spheres’. Probably it’s the passage of the Americans, up there, making their own search, going round in the biggest circle of them all.

I’ve been lying awake a long time, now. There is no clock in the room since the red travelling clock that Bobo gave me went out of order, but the slow, even beats of my heart repeat to me, like a clock; afraid, alive, afraid, alive, afraid, alive …

NADINE GORDIMER’s many novels include The Conservationist , joint winner of the Booker Prize, Get A Life, Burger’s Daughter, July’s People, My Son’s Story, The Pickup and, most recently, No Time Like the Present . Her collections of short stories include The Soft Voice of the Serpent, Something Out There, Jump, Loot and, most recently, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black . She has also collected and edited Telling Tales , a story anthology published in fourteen languages whose royalties go to HIV/AIDS organisations. In 2010 her nonfiction writings were collected in Telling Times and a substantial selection of her stories was published in Life Times . Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She lives in South Africa.