At the heart of this story is an interracial couple Steve and Jabulile living in a newly - tentatively - free South Africa. He is a university lecturer she a lawyer both comrades in the Struggle and now parents of children born in freedom. There is nothing so extraordinary about their lives and yet in telling their story and the stories of their friends and families Gordimer manages to capture the tortured fragmented essence of a nation struggling to define itself in the post-apartheid world.