The Inheritors

Reviews

“Easily the most compelling new nonfiction book I’ve read in years. The Inheritors is not just a spellbinding, beautifully written story about apartheid South Africa, but also an augury for America today.”
—Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize “Many times while reading this book you will stop, shiver, shake your head, and sigh. Lyrical, deep, chilling, and prescient, it’s a book we will be talking about for years to come.” 
—Justice Malala, author of the #1 South African bestseller We Have Now Begun Our Descent  “Eve Fairbanks brings post-apartheid South Africa to rich, brilliant, witty, tragic, and humane life as only a wonderfully gifted writer who has lived her subject can.”  
—George Packer, author of The Unwinding, winner of the National Book Award “Eve Fairbanks writes with a rare combination of fearless psychological insight and political intelligence. This is a tremendous book: utterly absorbing and urgently thought-provoking.” 
—Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award  “Fairbanks’s empathetic, comprehensive reporting shines… providing insight into how ordinary people build lives in the aftermath of political upheaval…. Her curiosity seems boundless... swept up in the rich tapestry of the country and... an abundance of personal memories, fables, speculation and musings.” 
—The New York Times Book Review  “The Inheritors does the brutal and scintillating work of asking and answering the question of how truly lasting is liberation, inviting us into the interior lives of three of the most complicated and complicating characters I’ve read this century. Bookmaking like this is a rigorous feat of wonder, love and risk.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal ”The most dynamic storyteller at the most interesting cocktail party could scarcely achieve more than Eve Fairbanks has…. Richly drawn and often moving.”
—The Washington Post “Fairbanks’s prose is masterful, and there are passages in the book that sing. It is an ambitious project. Anyone seeking to make sense of South Africa’s messy and complicated post-apartheid journey is a brave soul. And there is plenty of courageous writing in The Inheritors.”
—Foreign Policy “A moving group portrait of disillusion and resilience.” 
—The Christian Science Monitor “Fairbanks is too good a writer to resort to crude psychologizing, but she repeatedly suggests that there is a terrible price to pay for trying to ignore how people see their own situations…  unfailingly empathetic, she draws out tangled emotions with such skill and sensitivity.”
—The New York Times (Editor's Choice) Expand reviews