RESULTS

This rich story collection will be a reminder to Nadine Gordimer's countless admirers, and a taster for the uninitiated, of her enduring imaginative power. A woman gauges the state of her marriage by the tone of her husband's cello; a wife reads her husband's mood by the scent in the nape of his neck; a newly emigrated couple are divided by visual obsession, he with his native Budapest, she with South African suburbia. With consummate artistry, Gordimer illustrates the show downs, standoffs and highlights of human intimacy while penetrating the nuances of immigration, national identity and race.

Paul Bannerman, an ecologist in Africa, believes he controls the trajectory of his life, with the markers of vocation and marriage. But when he's diagnosed with thyroid cancer and prescribed treatment that makes him radioactive and for a period a danger to others, he questions, as Auden wrote, 'What authority gives/ Existence its surprise.' Taken in by his parents, businessman Adrian and successful lawyer Lyndsay, to protect his wife and child from radiation, back in his childhood garden he faces the contradiction between the values of his conservation work and those of his wife, an advertising agency executive. While threat of projects to build a nuclear reactor and drain the country's vital wetlands preoccupy Paul, the strange state of his existence leads his mother to face her own past. With Paul cured and normality apparently returned, his parents take a holiday in Mexico to fulfil the archaeological vocation his father missed. The consequence of this is the final surprise of passionate existences.

When South Africa is riven by war and as the Smales, a white couple, Maureen, Bam and their children, are forced to flee their comfortable middle-class home and take refuge in the village of their former servant July, their relationships are completely transformed.

Management Teaching use: The story of how a white family come to terms with their forced cohabitation with a black family in South Africa. Although it is an extreme case, this text offers a parallel with families of expatriate employees forced to live abroad. Students might think about the difficulties that families inhabiting foreign cultures might experience and particularly the strain this places upon the employee. The text also demonstrates the necessary compromise for such families. Since one of the major reasons for curtailment of overseas postings is family problems, the students should also think about what procedures international organisations might put in place to make expatriate families comfortable.

A startling new work from a Nobel prize-winning author: ten short stories, each a revelation of our interior lives, each entering unforeseen contexts of our contemporary world. In the title story an earthquake exposes both an ocean bed strewn with treasure among the dead, and the avarice of the town's survivors. In 'The Diamond Mine' a woman remembers her first, passionately erotic experience, hidden, in the company of her parents, with a soldier who may not be alive to remember her. The anopheles mosquito brings death to the saunas and other playgrounds of the developed with in 'The Emissary'. In 'Karma', Gordimer's inventiveness knows no bounds: in five returns to the earthly life, taking on different ages and genders, a disembodied narrator testifies to unfinished business - critically, wittily - and questions the nature of existence.

Set in South Africa, this is the story of Vera Stark, a lawyer and an independent mother of two, who works for the Legal Foundation representing blacks trying to reclaim land that was once theirs. As her country lurches towards majority rule, so she discovers a need to reconstruct her own life.

Along with making music, the art of storytelling is the oldest form of enchantment as entertainment. The twenty-one stories in this anthology are written in different 'voices' - vividly individual styles - and all have come together to bring the joy of reading to whoever takes up this remarkable collection. All twenty-one writers have given their stories without any fee or royalty. The publishers of each edition in each country where the anthology is published have produced the book without receiving any profit or royalty. Musicians have given their talents for the benefit of the forty million men, women and children infected with HIV and AIDS worldwide. These writers have decided that they too wanted to contribute in some way to the fight against the pandemic disease from which no country, no individual, is safely isolated.