Some commentators have classified "Burger's Daughter" as a political and historical novel. In their book "Socialist Cultures East and West: A Post-Cold War Reassessment", M. Keith Booker and Dubravka Juraga call Gordimer's work one of the "representative examples of African historical novels", saying that it is an "intense engagement with the history of apartheid in South Africa". Academic Robert Boyers calls it "one of the best political novels of our period", and an historical novel because of its "retrospective homage to generations past". Gordimer herself described "Burger's Daughter" as "an historical critique", and a political novel, which she defines as a work that "explicates the effects of politics on human lives and, unlike a political tract, does not propagate an ideology".