The pickup

The Pickup begins with a question of who has really picked up whom. Julie Summers is the daughter of a wealthy, powerful businessman, and she is trying to get away from the privileged background she despises. When her car breaks down on a seedy street, a young Arab mechanic slides out from under a vehicle at a nearby garage and helps her. He is an illegal immigrant, desperate to avoid deportation to his poor desert homeland.

What follows between them is unpredictable and relentless, and it upsets each one's assumptions about the other. The novel moves between the mixed society of the new South Africa and an Arab village in the desert.

Nadine Gordimer uses their story to look at emigration and immigration as rites of passage that could happen anywhere in the world. It asks what solutions life demands in extraordinary circumstances, and whether love can survive once every certainty outside the couple has been taken away.