Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories
By Nadine Gordimer
Bloomsbury £8.99; 192 pages
FT bookshop price: £7.19

The best stories in Nadine Gordimer’s 11th collection share the nuances of loss and dislocation that come from peering back into the “foreign country” of the past: a widow delicately probes her late husband’s male lover, a young woman unravels the truth of who her father might be, a German wife adjusts to the bewildering hinterland of her African husband’s heritage.