My Traitor's Heart

An Afrikaner crime reporter returns home to face the evil and complex legacy of South African apartheid in “a witness-bearing act of the rarest courage” (Michael Kerr). Rian Malan’s classic work of reportage, My Traitor’s Heart is at once beautiful, horrifying, and profound in ways that earned him comparisons to Michael Herr and Ryszard Kapuściński and inspired the London Times to call him “South Africa’s Hunter S. Thompson.” An Afrikaner, Malan is the scion of a centuries-old clan deeply involved in the creation of apartheid. As a young crime reporter, he covered the atrocities of an undeclared race war and ultimately fled the country, unhinged by what he had seen. Eight years later, he returns to confront his own demons, and those that are tearing his country apart. With unflinching candor, Malan explores the grizzly violence and perverse rationalizations at the root of his nation’s identity. Written in the final years of apartheid’s bloody collapse, My Traitor’s Heart still resonates, offering a “passionate, blazingly honest testament” to the darkest recesses of the black and white South African psyches. “Those who read it will never again see South Africa the same way” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).