"Cry, the Beloved Country," by Alan Paton

Considered South Africa's most famous and important book--and the African continent's only outshone by Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart--get ready for a 20th-Century classic that tells a story touching on subject matter still very much discussed today. Considered problematic by many, it has become one of the most challenged and banned books in our own country and the world, including South Africa itself. An immediate best-seller when published in 1948, the novel is deemed important enough to not only garner literary awards, but receive two award-winning movie adaptations (in 1951 and 1995). And Oprah picked it as an early selection for her own book club. Throughout much of the world, its title sustains immediate recognition even among schoolchildren, while GreatestBooks.org (which compiles data from numerous book-rating lists) ranks it as the 303rd greatest book of all time. What will you think?!

From Goodreads:

Cry, the Beloved Country, the most famous and important novel in South Africa’s history, was an immediate worldwide bestseller in 1948. Alan Paton’s impassioned novel about a black man’s country under white man’s law is a work of searing beauty.

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

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.