Alan Paton Books in Order

A white South African police lieutenant breaks the law forbidding relationships across racial boundaries. His involvement with a Black woman leaves him confronting the judgment of his family, his society, and his own conscience in an unforgiving world.

Paton introduces South Africa through its geography, history, resources, industries, and forms of government. His account also considers the customs and experiences of its people, including the racial divisions that shape life in the country.

Ten stories explore the injustices and racial divisions of South African life. Through individual experiences rendered with compassion and unease, Paton examines the human consequences of a society that denies dignity and opportunity to many of its people.

This collection brings together Alan Paton's essays for Contact from 1958 to 1966, documenting his engagement with South African public life. Edward Callan's introductory account places the writings alongside Paton's work in the Liberal Party.

Drawing on the prayer of Saint Francis while his wife is dying, Paton reflects on faith, love, and service. His meditations ask how people facing sorrow and selfishness can become active agents of peace in the world.

Following his wife's death, Paton looks back on their marriage and the life they shared. This personal account brings mourning together with remembrance, tracing the meaning of a partnership through the painful experience of its ending.

Alan Paton recounts the life of Geoffrey Clayton, Archbishop of Cape Town during the years when apartheid became established in law. The biography places his religious leadership within South Africa’s widening conflict over racial policy and Christian responsibility.

Poems, stories, articles, and speeches trace Paton's concerns with literature, prison reform, and apartheid. Arranged around periods of his life, these shorter writings bring his imaginative work alongside his public efforts to confront injustice in South Africa.

Paton recalls his childhood, education, and work at a reformatory as he traces the path toward writing Cry, the Beloved Country. His memories connect personal development with prison reform and the racial tensions shaping South African life.

During South Africa's turbulent 1950s, the lives of a group of men and women intersect with political resistance and deepening segregation. Their everyday experiences reveal how public events reshape private relationships and expose the costs of racial division.

These essays and shorter pieces record Paton's response to the violence and injustice shaping South Africa. His reflections follow a country under mounting pressure, bringing a writer's moral concerns to the public conflicts of its modern history.

In the second volume of his autobiography, Paton returns to the struggle against apartheid and the pressures of South African political life. He reflects on injustice, resistance, and the search for a reasoned way through the country's conflicts.

More than 130 poems, songs and psalms bring together sixty years of Alan Paton’s writing. Drawn largely from manuscripts preserved in his archives, the collection presents the poetic work of a writer better known for his novels.

In 1956, Paton joins six amateur explorers searching the Kalahari for a rumored lost city. Their journey in an unreliable truck becomes an account of rough travel, unusual companions, desert encounters, and affection for an austere landscape.

Alan Paton follows Jan Hofmeyr from an extraordinary academic childhood into South African political leadership. Hofmeyr’s Christian and liberal convictions bring him into conflict with nationalist opinion, while his career becomes bound to the country’s narrowing hopes for racial reform.