My Traitor’s Heart, by Rian Malan

“Here is truth-telling at its most exemplary and courageous. The remorseless exercise of a reporter’s anguished conscience gives us a South Africa we thought we knew all about: but we knew nothing.” —JOHN LE CARRÉ

My Traitor's Heart is an astonishing work of reportage, at once beautiful, horrifying, and profound—a book unlike any other about South Africa. Rian Malan is an Afrikaner, scion of a centuries-old clan deeply involved in the creation of apartheid. As a young crime reporter, Malan covered the atrocities of an undeclared race war and ultimately fled the country, unhinged by what he had seen. Eight years later, he returns to confront his own demons, and those that are tearing his country apart. Written in the final years of apartheid's bloody collapse, My Traitor's Heart still resonates, offering a chilling—but ultimately redemptive-vision of the darkest recesses of the black and white South African psyches.

"A passionate, blazingly honest testament…Those who read it will never again see South Africa in quite the same way.":"A passionate, blazingly honest testament Those who read it will never again see South Africa in quite the same way." —CHRISTOPHER HOPE, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Remarkable... [Malan's] analysis is penetrating, comprehensive, and—in its relentless accumulation of ghastly detail—heartbreaking." —JONATHAN YARDLEY, The Washington Post Book World

"Here, as in nothing I've read before, is the demotic voice of black and Afrikaner South Africa. ... Triumphant." —SALMAN RUSHDIE