Eight years in the making, this book charts Nadine Gordimer's life and work, providing a vibrant portrait of the country in which Gordimer lives, the history she lived through, and the people around her-people in South Africa, such as Nelson Mandela, George Bizos, Es'kia Mphahlele, Bram Fischer, Nat Nakasa, Desmond Tutu and Alan Paton; and people abroad, including Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, Anthony Sampson, Edward Said, Amos Oz, Harry Levin and New Yorker editor, Katherine White.

Drawing upon unprecedented access to Gordimer and her documents, No Cold Kitchen gives sympathetic but rigorous attention to the full range of Gordimer's work, teasing out the inevitable contradictions between her public and private voices and granting the reader an intimate insight into what Gordimer underwent and overcame, both during apartheid and afterwards. The author shrewdly chronicles the drive that led Gordimer, who described herself as a ""barefoot girl from Springs,"" to a Nobel Prize for literature.