CRIMES OF CONSCIENCE by Nadine Gordimer...

CRIMES OF CONSCIENCE by Nadine Gordimer (Heinemann: $8.95). An outspoken foe of apartheid (her work has been banned at times in South Africa), Nadine Gordimer describes life in and around Johannesburg during the ‘80s in these incisive short stories. She focuses on the ways in which the unnatural divisions within South African society warped the lives of people of all races: Blacks suffered terribly, but whites who even grudgingly complied with the Draconian racial laws lost their souls in the process. Her spirit crushed by the system, a black woman betrays her husband’s best friend--and earns the hatred of her neighbors in “A City of the Dead, a City of the Living”; the interracial romance in “Country Lovers” exposes the hypocrisy and injustice that underlay the artificial social order. In addition to “Crimes of Conscience,” a second collection of Gordimer’s stories, “Some Monday for Sure,” has been issued in Heinemann’s “African Writers” series.