Not for a day or two, but for two months, after a year of research and study, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Allen Drury traveled through the Republic of South Africa — without preconceptions, without pre-packaged solutions, with neither automatic condemnation nor automatic approval of what he saw.

He went with three basic purposes: to report honestly, to describe faithfully, to judge fairly. Because he went in this spirit he has produced in these pages perhaps the first well-balanced, compassionate, genuinely illuminating picture of a complex and troubled country whose gallant peoples and fearful racial problems make it of major importance to the world.

Here you will find neither the pet slogans and easy clichés of the Republic's enemies nor the defensive self-serving arguments of her friends. Here you will find South Africa as South Africa is, speaking directly to you in the words of all her peoples, White, Black, Indian and Coloured. You will find a prosperous, surging, vigorously booming nation filled with well-meaning, desperately worried citizens of all races who hope against hope that time and mutual effort will permit them to achieve a peaceable, truly constructive answer for one of the toughest problems history ever handed any country.

They are all here, in their own words, speaking directly to you as a master reporter heard them in hundreds of interviews: Prime Minister Verwoerd, Prime Minister Vorster, Mrs. Helen Suzman, Chief Albert Luthuli, Alan Paton, Anton Rupert, Nadine Gordimer, Ian Robertson, Sir de Villiers Graaff, and many, many more, of all races and from all walks of life.

With the superb writing skill that has made such novels as Advise and Consent and Capable of Honor bestselling favorites, Allen Drury brings you in all its vivid reality a country that is at one and the same time great and petty, admirable and tragic, hopeless and hopeful — "a very strange society" and a very human one, which you will understand as you never have before when you have read this book.

A Very Strange Society destroys the clichés and illusions about South Africa, and with compassion and objectivity presents it in all its frustrating, yet curiously hopeful, weakness and strength.