[2] The book explores the successes and failures of the Commission, the effects of the proceedings on her personally, and the possibility of genuine reconciliation in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Country of My Skull blends poetry, prose, reporting, and verbatim testimony from the Commission — one critic calls it "a hybrid work, written at the edges of reportage, memoir, and metafiction.

[5] It was published in the United States by Times Books in 1999, as Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa.

These moral questions especially preoccupy Krog because she is a white Afrikaner who retains a strong attachment to Afrikaans culture and history, even as she is horrified by the ravages of Apartheid.

She is occasionally deeply moved by exhibitions of these philosophies, and she admires Tutu in particular, calling him "the compass" and the core of the Commission — most importantly, "It is he who finds language for what is happening."

For example, as Krog watches Tutu plead personally with Winnie Mandela to testify truthfully, she has an intense emotional reaction: Ah, the Commission!

She writes of the Commission, "here the marginalised voice speaks to the public ear, the unspeakable is spoken — and translated — the personal story brought from the innermost depths of the individual binds us anew to the collective."

[9][10][11][12] Afrikaans writer Rian Malan called it "a great impressionistic splurge of blood and guts and vivid imagery, leavened with swathes of post-modern literary discourse and fragments of brilliant poetry.

[15] Several reviewers commented on how difficult it is to read the detailed TRC testimony of victims of human rights abuses,[9] and Nicole Devarenne of the London Review of Books suggested that Krog's personal suffering over the course of the book is supposed to appear "redemptive": when Krog finds unity with her countrymen (especially her non-white countrymen), it is because she suffers alongside them.

"[10] In a 2006 edition of the literary review New Contrast, poet Stephen Watson, then head of the English department at the University of Cape Town, alleged that parts of Country of My Skull had been plagiarised from a 1976 essay, "Myth and Education," by Ted Hughes.

During the controversy that followed Watson's allegations, the Mail & Guardian published claims that Krog had also lifted, without attribution, parts of Isabel Hofmeyr's non-fiction book, We Spend Our Years as a Story That is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (1994).