At the heart of the story is an interracial couple, Steve and Jabulile, living in a newly - tentatively - free South Africa, he a university lecturer she a lawyer, both comrades in the Struggle and now parents of children born in freedom.There is nothing so extraordinary about their lives, and yet, in telling their story, and the stories of their friends and families, Gordimer manages to capture the tortured, fragmented essence of a nation struggling to define itself in the post-apartheid world of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. The subject is contemporary, but Gordimer's treatment is, as ever, timeless.