Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful is the third novel of Alan Paton, the South African author who is best known for writing "Cry, the Beloved Country". "Ah, but Your Land is Beautiful" is an anti-apartheid novel, in a similar vein to "Cry, the Beloved Country". It is a fictional reworking of Paton's own years working as a political activist and of the experience he gained working as the president of the Liberal Party of South Africa. In the foreword, Paton describes how the book contains both real and fictitious characters, but that two
Beloved (novel) trade as a Holocaust-like genocide. Others, while concurring that "Beloved" is at times overwritten, have lauded the novel as a profound and extraordinary act of imagination. Noting the work's mythic dimensions and political focus, these commentators have treated the novel as an exploration of family, trauma, and the repression of memory as well as an attempt to restore the historical record and give voice to the collective memory of African Americans. Indeed, critics and Morrison herself have indicated that the controversial epigraph to "Beloved", "sixty million and more", is drawn from a number of studies on the African slave trade