A Guest of Honour (novel)


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 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".