The very next year, Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Swedish Academy explicitly cited My Son's Story in their press release, calling it "ingenious and revealing and at the same time enthralling".

[1] My Son's Story tells the tale of a family torn apart by illicit love, political struggle and Apartheid.

Sonny, an educated schoolteacher classed by South African law as Coloured, is slowly drawn into the struggle against the white regime.

Unable to share this struggle with his family, he has an affair with the one person with whom he can talk, a white social worker.

"The heart and soul of this brilliantly suggestive and knowing novel," wrote Robert Coles in the New York Times, "is its courageous exploration of such matters, of the conceits and deceits that inform the lives not only of ordinary people but those whom the rest of us invest with such majesty and awe.