Cry, The Beloved Country.

Tan cloth binding with brown title on the spine and front board.

This book would command a £1,200 price tag if its binding had not suffered sun damage and lost its dust jacket.

No dust jacket. First edition. The acclaimed social protest novel by the South African anti-apartheid activist. CRY, BELOVED COUNTRY takes place in the final years of World War II and its immediate aftermath, focusing on the racial injustices within South African society that led to their systematic legalization, Apartheid, in the same year this book was published. Upon the release of the 1995 film, Nelson Mandela looked with bittersweet nostalgia upon the setting of the novel, remarking that "Cry, the Beloved Country represents a tribute to South Africa's youth, for they bore the brunt of the dislocation that apartheid organization brought on our communities." While the book has been subject to important critiques, especially from Black writers, CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY has retained an international influence through its acceptance into the Western Canon that often populates high school and university literature courses. The human realities of systemic discrimination shown in the novel make it a moving ballad of love and despair for Apartheid South Africa.

Cry, the Beloved Country is a 1948 novel by South African writer Alan Paton. Set in the prelude to apartheid in South Africa, it follows a black village priest and a white farmer who must deal with news of a murder.

American publisher Bennett Cerf remarked at that year's meeting of the American Booksellers Association that there had been "only three novels published since the first of the year that were worth reading… Cry, The Beloved Country, The Ides of March, and The Naked and the Dead." It remains one of the best-known works of South African literature.

Two cinema adaptations of the book have been made, the first in 1951 and the second in 1995. The novel was also adapted as a musical called Lost in the Stars (1949), with a book by the American writer Maxwell Anderson and music composed by the German emigre Kurt Weill.

Alan Stewart Paton (11 January 1903 – 12 April 1988) was a South African writer and anti-apartheid activist. His works include the novels Cry, the Beloved Country and Too Late the Phalarope.

In 1948, four months after the publication of Cry, the Beloved Country, the right-wing National Party was elected in South Africa. Paton, together with Margaret Ballinger, Edgar Brookes, and Leo Marquard, formed the Liberal Association in early-1953. On 9 May 1953, it became the Liberal Party of South Africa, with Paton as a founding co-president, which fought against the apartheid laws introduced by the National Party government. He served as President of the LPSA until its forced dissolution by the government in the late 1960s, officially because its membership comprised both Blacks and Whites.

Paton was a friend of Bernard Friedman, founder of the Progressive Party. Paton's writer colleague Laurens van der Post, who had moved to England in the 1930s, helped the party in many ways. The South African Secret Police were aware that van der Post was providing money to Paton and the LPSA, but they could not stop it by legal procedures. Paton himself advocated peaceful opposition to apartheid, as did many others in the party. Yet, some LPSA members took a more violent stance, and consequently some stigma attached to the party, not just within South Africa, but also outside the country. Paton's passport was confiscated by the South African government upon his return from New York in 1960, where he had been presented with the annual Freedom Award. It was not returned to him for ten years.

Paton retired to Botha's Hill, where he resided until his death. He is honoured at the Hall of Freedom of the Liberal International organisation.