By interviewing the people who were most affected when South Africa dismantled its white supremacist institutions, Fairbanks marries the overarching story the country's turbulent apartheid history with Black and white individuals' intimate experiences before and after 1994, when so much—and so little—changed.

As she reports, Fairbanks falls in love with South Africa in all its beauty and complexity. Her curiosity seems boundless — a boundlessness that, translated into writing, can at times be distracting. As Fairbanks follows her main characters, she gets swept up in the rich tapestry of the country and includes an abundance of personal memories, fables, speculation and musings. She seems to have spoken to or listened in on the conversations of nearly every one of the hundreds of people whose paths she crossed during the years she spent working on this book.

Fairbanks is too good a writer to resort to crude psychologizing, but she repeatedly suggests that there is a terrible price to pay for trying to ignore how people see their own situations; the undeniable material facts of everything that happens to them is often inseparable from an emotional reality.

The most dynamic storyteller at the most interesting cocktail party could scarcely achieve more than Eve Fairbanks has achieved in The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning. How this achievement lands with readers will depend on whether they want more than storytelling from a book on this topic.

... a sensitive, often engrossing portrait of the nation during and after apartheid.

Fairbanks’s vivid reportage depicts a South Africa awash in racial unease and false consciousness.