A Dry White Season, by André Brink

By: André Brink. First published in 1979, this novel follows an ordinary white Afrikaner schoolteacher who is drawn into investigating the death in police detention of a Black man wrongly suspected of activism, and whose search for the truth pushes him from quiet complicity into open opposition to the apartheid state. The book was banned in South Africa on publication, though Brink distributed thousands of copies through underground channels, and it went on to win the 1980 Martin Luther King Memorial Prize. It was adapted into a 1989 film starring Donald Sutherland and Susan Sarandon, which was itself banned in South Africa.