![]() ![]() It's clear that evasion isn't a long-term option, and that she'll have to deal with her politician father and his clamour of strong-natured women. She holes up in New York, pushing around a stagnating thesis and an uptight lover, but avoids returning to the Caribbean island of Triunion where she grew up. ![]() Marshall's 1991 novel begins with an abortion, and Ursa trudges back to her apartment grimy with "the blackened fallout from the city". DJĭaughters, by Paule Marshall (Serpent's Tail, £7.99) Although squinting hard at received pieties, Gordimer doesn't subject her own to the same scrutiny, and occasionally wraps herself in the prophet's mantle: in one story, an unborn foetus dreams of becoming a novelist in another she asserts: "but the writer knows something no one else knows the sea-change of the imagination". Elsewhere, Gordimer imagines a crossover between the university and the homeless, or the bafflement of a middle-aged break-up: in each of these, the privileged gawp at upheaval as if for the first time. ![]() Even the most fertile countryside is land-mined, until the administrator feels that "green hand-grenades hung from the branches of the avocado tree". In "Mission Statement", a white aid administrator begins a relationship with a reticent politician and with Africa itself, neither of them a comfortable bunk-up. At her strongest, she refuses easy consolations, especially in the most substantial tales. Loot, by Nadine Gordimer (Bloomsbury, £6.99) ![]()
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