The house gun - Nadine Gordimer

A house gun – kept like a house cat: a fact of ordinary life. How else can you defend yourself against losing your computer and TV, your works and rings? Harold, a respected insurance executive, and his doctor wife, Claudia, are faced with something they thought could never happen to them.

What kind of loyalty do a mother and a father owe a son who has committed the unimaginable? How has he come to disregard the sanctity of human life? What have they done to influence his character? Where have they failed him? Duncan’s guilt is not concealed, not even mitigated. Everything in their world has changed.

The parents and Duncan find themselves in the hands of flamboyant Senior Counsel Hamilton Motsamai, a black advocate returned from exile and home, to a country freed from racial discrimination, a distinguished member of the legal profession. It is also a country in which the death penalty is being challenged as invalid under the country's new constitution, but it is still on the statute book.

The House Gun is a passionate narrative of that final test of human relations we call love - between lovers of all kinds and parents and their offspring. It moves with the restless pace of living itself, from the intimate to the general condition; if it is a parable present of violence, it is also an affirmation of the will to human reconciliation that starts where it must, between individual men and women.