The House Gun

A house gun, like a house cat: a fact of ordinary life, today.

How else can you defend yourself against losing your hi-fi equipment, your TV set and computer?

The respected Executive Director of an insurance company, Harald, and his doctor wife, Claudia, are faced with something that could never happen to them: their son, Duncan, has committed murder.

What kind of loyalty do a mother and father owe a son who has committed the unimaginable horror?

How could he have ignored the sanctity of human life?

What have they done to influence his character; how have they failed him?

Nadine Gordimer's new novel is a passionate narrative of the complex manifestations of that final test of human relations we call love - between lovers of all kinds, and parents and children.

It moves with the restless pace of living itself; if it is a parable of present violence, it is also an affirmation of the will to reconciliation that starts where it must, between individual men and women.