Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) was a writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. In this 1983 study, Christopher Heywood stresses the point that in her very first novel, The Lying Days (1953), Gordimer, besides weaving a delicate web of personal relations, also takes a detached, historical view of man as a haunted species on a complex planet, (a view not unlike that of Thomas Hardy) and this evolutionary theme has...