A Guest of Honour (novel)

First edition (publ. Viking Press)

A Guest of Honour is a 1970 novel by Nobel winning South African writer Nadine Gordimer. Published four years after her novel The Late Bourgeois World, the novel is a political novel that explores the role of revolutionary ideas in new African states.

Critical reception

The New York Times reviewer Thomas Fisk called the novel "a long, spacious, comprehensive work of fiction" which has "something Olympian, something magnificently confident [about how] this South African writer goes about her work." Fisk's review focuses on the stylistic qualities of the novel, calling the characters "exceedingly human: complicated, erring, driven by fleshy appetites and by the loftiest resolves" and discussing the setting as a "landscape s tactile and so sensuous that it becomes a participant in everything that occurs".

Further reading

• Fido, Elaine (1978-04-01). "A guest of honour: A feminine view of masculinity". World Literature Written in English. 17 (1): 30–37. doi:10.1080/17449857808588500. ISSN 0093-1705.
• Donge, Jan Kees van (1982-10-01). "Nadine Gordimer's "A Guest of Honour": A Failure to Understand Zambian Society". Journal of Southern African Studies. 9 (1): 74–92. JSTOR 2636733.
• Ogede, Ode S. (2006-01-01). "The Liberal Tradition in South African Literature: Still a Curse? Nadine Gordimer's A Guest of Honour Revisited". International Fiction Review. 33 (1). ISSN 1911-186X.