Burger's Daughter

Burger's Daughter is a political novel by the South African writer Nadine Gordimer, first published by Jonathan Cape in June 1979. The book was expected to be banned in South Africa.

The novel is narrated by Rosa Burger, whose father Lionel is a white doctor imprisoned for life for organising resistance to apartheid. She has been raised inside a political family, in a country where the state watches its opponents and where the children of activists inherit both their parents' commitments and their parents' enemies. After her father dies in prison, Rosa has to work out what her life is for. Her choices take her out of South Africa and into Europe, and then back again, and the novel follows the movement of her thinking as much as the events of her life. The book is set in a society where the everyday business of suspicion and violence shapes everything, and where a white woman's political sympathies are of very little use unless she does something with them.

Gordimer writes about political commitment without simplifying it, and Rosa's difficulty is that the cause gave her a role before she had chosen one.