The lying days

Blurb

The Lying Days is the debut novel of Nobel winning South African novelist, Nadine Gordimer. It was published in 1953 in London by Victor Gollancz and New York by Simon & Schuster. It is Gordimer's third published book, following two collections of short stories, Face to Face, and The Soft Voice of the Serpent. The novel is semi-autobiographical, with the main character coming from a small mining town in Africa similar to Gordimer's own childhood. The novel is also a bildungsroman "about waking up from the naivete of a small colonial town."
In the New York Times review from 1953, critic James Stern compared the novel favorably to the works of Alan Paton, especially Cry, the Beloved Country, describing The Lying Days as the better of the two novels. Stern described the novel as less "novel" and more "biography", following the style and form of biographical writing.