by Nadine Gordimer

The Smales are people who have overstayed. Extensions of Nadine Gordimer's earlier characters - those uneasy, conscience-stricken whites attempting to come to terms with the ambiguities of South African life - they find themselves face to face with the ultimate: total revolution. The time is the very near future, when rioting blacks have taken over the country. Airports are being bombed, and whites cannot leave. Bam and Maureen, with their three young children, have no choice but to flee to July's isolated village.

On a superficial level, this is a wonderful adventure story. It has the ingenuity and suspense of ''Robinson Crusoe,'' the wry twists of ''The Admirable Crichton.'' The Smales, whose hastily packed baggage includes a gadget for removing dry cleaners' tags without damaging the fingernails, are forced to adapt to a life of weed gathering and mealie cooking, of shivering in a rainstorm while the hut walls grow sodden and flying cockroaches zip through the dark. The clay vessels of the sort that Maureen used to collect as ornaments are now her kitchen utensils...

... On a deeper level, of course, "July's People" is much more than another survival story; and this level succeeds so extraordinarily because of the Smaleses' liberalism. It would have been too easy to make them racists, who finally see the light while roughing it with the natives. Instead, they are from the outset sensitive, politically aware, genuinely concerned with the welfare of black South Africans. How ironic, then, is their discovery that even in the underbrush, reactionaries exist! And how much subtler and more complicated is the hostility that develops between Maureen and July! In a scene with July that's especially affecting because it takes place in another language - a language she doesn't speak - Maureen perceives the truth: For July ''to be intelligent, honest, dignified for her was nothing; his measure as a man was taken elsewhere and by others. She was not his mother, his wife, his sister, his friend, his people...''

-The New York Times Book Review