Perhaps the most famous South African novel. Paton was anti apartheid. this was published 3 months before the Nationalist Party won the election (and subsequently began implementing apartheid in earnest), in 1948. If you loved To Kill a Mockingbird as a kid you're going to really love this. If you have a visceral, fear reaction to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, you may fear this.

I found this very sad and quiet and human. Beautiful land and plant descriptions from a man who loved his country. It's my understanding that Americans failed broadly to connect this book to their own race relations.

"And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown. And the conscience shall be thrust down; the light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in some day not yet come; and how it will come, and when it will come, we shall not think about at all."