Akron Public Library

First published in 1948, the author writes an impassioned account of a black man's country under white man's law.

A novel takes readers deep into the heart of apartheid in the early 1970s, focusing on a mixed race family that is trying to survive on the closely regulated line between black and white.

Medical student, Isaac Muthethe, is forced to flee South Africa in 1976 when he is hired as a gardener by a young American woman, Alice Mendelssohn. When her husband goes missing, they go to Africa to search for him.

"Perfect for readers of The Secret Life of Bees and The Help, a perceptive and searing look at Apartheid-era South Africa, told through one unique family brought together by tragedy. Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a nine-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles...

"When Cathleen Harrington leaves her home in Ireland in 1919 to travel to South Africa, she knows that she does not love the man she is to marry there --her fiance Edward, whom she has not seen for five years. Isolated and estranged in a small town in the harsh Karoo desert, her only real companions are her diary and her housemaid, and later the housemaid's daughter, Ada. When Ada is born, Cathleen recognizes in her someone she can love and respond...