Books like Age of Iron
In Cape Town in the late 1980s, Mrs Curren, a retired classics lecturer, learns she has terminal cancer on the day a homeless man moves into the alley beside her house, and begins a long letter to her daughter in America.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Age of Iron
My Son's Story
Will, the teenage son of a coloured schoolteacher turned activist, sees his father coming out of a cinema with his white mistress.
July's People
When revolution breaks out in South Africa, the Smales, a liberal white family from Johannesburg, flee to the remote village of their servant, July, and must depend on him.
The Promise
Four funerals, each in a different decade, mark the decline of the Swarts, a white South African family, and their failure to keep the promise to give their Black maid, Salome, the house she lives in.
Disgrace
A disgraced South African professor retreats to his daughter's farm, where a violent attack forces both of them to reckon with the country's new power dynamics.
The Spare Room
Helen gives her spare room in Melbourne to her old friend Nicola, who has come down from Sydney for three weeks of quack cancer treatment, and has to nurse her through it.
Life & Times of Michael K
Michael K, a gardener with a harelip and a slow way of speaking, sets out across a South Africa torn by civil war to take his sick mother back to the countryside where she grew up, and keeps trying to live on his own terms, outside every camp.
The Power of One
An English boy growing up in wartime South Africa is sent to a hated Afrikaner boarding school, learns to box from a drunken former welterweight on a train, and decides to become champion of the world.
Burnt Sugar
Antara, an artist in Pune, cares for her mother Tara, who is losing her memory, a woman who once walked out on her marriage for an ashram and dragged her small daughter along.
The General in His Labyrinth
In 1830, Simón Bolívar, ill, stripped of power and despised, travels down the Magdalena River towards the coast on his last journey, meaning to sail into exile.
Tinkers
George Washington Crosby, an old repairer of clocks dying in his living room in Maine, remembers his father, an epileptic tinker who sold goods from a mule cart.
Cry, the Beloved Country
Stephen Kumalo, an elderly Zulu priest in the hills of Natal, travels to Johannesburg to look for his sister, who has stopped writing, and his son Absalom, who went to the city and never came back.
Ways of Dying
Toloki, a professional mourner in a South African city in the violent years before democracy, meets Noria, a woman from his village, at the funeral of her son.