Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s. The book is written with such keen empathy and understanding that to read it is to share fully in the gravity of the characters' situations. It both touches your heart deeply and inspires a renewed faith in the dignity of mankind. Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic tale, passionately African, timeless and universal, and beyond all, selfless.

Had to read it for AP English high school, very glad I did. Extraordinarily well-written book set in apartheid South Africa.

Very logically, it was a trip to South Africa that reminded me of this important book, and I'm very glad I have finally read it. It was probably the right time to read it too, since instead of it striking me as quaint and exotic, it was full of things that were already a little familiar to me, like place and language names.

The characters and plot are all highly symbolic, chosen for their representative value in telling the story of South Africa as Paton knew it, rather than being realistic references to specific people and events. White colonizers first systematically deconstructed the existing tribal system, then with the steady growth of "native" crime, they tried to patch things up. But the damage had been done, and rampant crime is still probably the one near-fatal flaw of modern South Africa. Otherwise it is a vibrant, exciting coming together of fascinating diverse cultures.

One thing that stood out was the sympathetic portrayal of whites who reached out to blacks and tried to redress some of the wrongs imposed by their society. The author himself was one of these, and certainly was using the medium of fiction to tell part of his own story. He succeeds at the same time at winning the readers' understanding of and sympathy for the plight of poor and unsophisticated but basically good and all-too-human blacks caught in the maelstrom of the times they lived in.

The language of the book may sound a bit stilted if you're expecting modern, fast-moving colloquial English. The writing is however in fact quite remarkable in how its echoes the syllable-timed tonal languages of black South Africa, and for me it was overall a pleasing effect.

Highly recommended - this a basic work not to be missed by any aspiring world citizen.

This is an excellent book. We are travelling to South Africa next year and this book gives an excellent view of the times.

I can't believe I'd never heard of this book before I received the list of books my church ladies book group was going to cover this year. I could not put this book down. It is the story of two elderly South African men, one black and one white, who had never met until the lives of their only sons tragically intersect. The two men find, not only that their sons were not the sons of their youth but vastly different, indeed their fathers truly had no idea what kind of men they had become.

As they try to come to know and understand the men their sons had become, two fathers learn and grow, themselves becoming new men in the process.
I highly recommend this book - I only wish I'd known about it sooner!

Oh, and I'm so glad that I did not know it was an Oprah's book club pick because, sad but true, that would have turned me off of it before I even opened the cover!

How much can a man love his country? How much can he love his son? His God? Can justice prevail when man cannot? What is forgiveness? Redemption? Grace? To consider all these elements in one novel is not possible. Or is it?

"Cry, the Beloved Country" is all these things and more. It is forgiveness writ large. It is agape love in the doing. It is the story of two fathers, each with a son. One son is the victim of apartheid and is lost. The other is also a victim of apartheid but of the other side. He seeks to find a way to make things better, to make things right. The lost one kills the seeking one. One is African, the other is Afrikaaner, and therein lies the difference and the ultimate. This difference, this ultimate, this absolute are what drove Alan Paton in the writing of South Africa's most famous, most searing novel of the separation of races in all ways.

Absalom Kumalo's life is limited in all ways because he is black South African. Arthur Jarvis is an engineer and has all the privileges of white South Africa, yet he is keen on social justice and works to bring it to pass. What irony then that the one without kills the one seeking to bring justice. However, it is this very irony that brings their fathers to friendship, to a bonding of black man and white man.

Umfundisi is the black priest (not Catholic) of a simple, poor church in a village located near the home of the rich landowner and farmer, James Jarvis, who really does not know his son until he is dead. It is the getting to know his son that he connects with the African, and the father becomes the son in the ways of love and forgiveness. The umfundisi is one of my favorite characters in all literature I have read because of his humility and reverence.

This novel, published in 1948, remains as one, even today, apropos to race relations, to their very real potentials and actualities. Mutual respect, sincerity, forgiveness, and grace all come to the fore in this most magnificent, lyrical novel.

It would be on my Top 10 list of books I would take if marooned on the proverbial deserted island.