Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton and Roy Blatchford and Jennie Sidney

This book is the most famous and important novel in South Africa's history, and an immediate worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1948.

Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law is a work of searing beauty. The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, " We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poets, almost all thin. In Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country the statesman, the poet and the novelist meet in a unique harmony."

Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man. - Jacket flap.

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My edition is paperback, but with the movie-tie in cover even though it shares the ISBN with the former paperback illustrated cover 0684818949.

This book is maybe not the fastest read. But when you do get into it, you get into it good. Beautiful prose, that at times can be tiring, but also can be very moving.
The book tells the story of an old Zulu parson from a little village in the KwaZulu-Natal area in South Africa, taking place just after the Second World War. This pastor's son gets bad news from the village and is summoned to go to the ‘big city' Johannesburg. In Johannesburg he finds out very grievous things about the several people who left Ndotsheni, amongst which is his son.

Whenever you think the book is getting to tiresome to continue reading the writer understood that something needs to change, or something needs to happen. The book changes central characters have way through the book, changing to focusing on an elderly English South Africa, who also gets summoned to Johannesburg because of bad news about his son.

Maybe not brilliant. But the issues addressed are issues which are certainly still relevant for Johannesburg and South Africa. 4 out of 5.