Summary: Anne McElvoy talks to Nobel laureate and Booker Prize winner Nadine Gordimer. In her new novel, No Time Like the Present, Gordimer examines her home country of South Africa in the post-apartheid world of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma and what has become of it since Mandela's jubilant release from prison. At the centre of the story is an interracial couple, Steve and Jabulile, living in a newly - tentatively - free South Africa, he a university lecturer she a lawyer, both comrades in the Struggle and now parents of children born in freedom. There is nothing extraordinary about their lives, and yet, in telling their story, and the stories of their friends and families, Gordimer manages to capture the state of her nation.
