Reviews

Praise for My Traitor's Heart"A tremendous book about candor, honor, and race, a witness-bearing act of the rarest courage. No one who reads it could ever forget it." --Michael Herr"Here is truth-telling at its most exemplary and courageous. The remorseless exercise of a reporter's anguished conscience gives us a South Africa we thought we knew all about: but we knew nothing." --John le Carr"Rian Malan is a master of landscape and a master of narrative, with a gift of living language that bubbles up from a full heart and an active mind." --V.S. Naipaul"Malan is bent on uncovering another level altogether of South African life, and he does so beautifully... He sharply expands our understanding of his strange, strange country's complexities." --William Finnegan, The New York Times"My Traitor's Heart grips you by the throat and won't let go." --Peter Gorner, The Chicago Tribune"A passionate, blazingly honest testament... Those who read it will never again see South Africa in quite the same way." --Christopher Hope, Los Angeles Times Book Review"Rian Malan could always see the story when others had long since lost the plot. Sometimes he went completely off his head as he drew out the fugitive detail, digging in dirt for a diamond, shaking up the grievously overlooked. He tried to escape the word. He went fishing for five years, trying to hide from the relentlessly pursuing plot, but to no avail. When it comes to writing, Malan is dangerously good and there is no getting away." --Lin Sampson"A book that is part investigative reportage, part personal confession, and in all respects remarkable... Penetrating, comprehensive, and-in its relentless accumulation of ghastly detail-heartbreaking." --Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World"Here, as in nothing I've read before, is the demotic voice of black and Afrikaner South Africa... Triumphant." --Salman Rushdie"An unflinching and intimate story of a man fighting against injustice in his homeland, even as he must come to terms with his own family's poisonous role there." --Austin Merrill, Vanity Fair

This soul-searching account of an Afrikaner's life in apartheid South Africa joins a growing body of publications by South Africans of every ethnic group. Malan, the grand nephew of a major definer of the doctrine of apartheid, Daniel Malan, left South Africa in 1977, in part to avoid military service, and returned eight years later. This book reports his observations of violent death in the land. He details instances of whites killing blacks, blacks killing blacks, blacks killing whites, politically motivated murder, and economically motivated murder. Well written, gripping, and disturbing, the descriptions leave one with a sense of despair which makes Malan's final note of hope all the more remarkable. Recommended for adult general readers as well as those with a special interest in South Africa.-- Maidel Cason, Univ. of Delaware Lib., Newark