New Mandela book offers personal portrait

Conversations with Myself was compiled with the 92-year-old Mandela's blessing by a team of archivists, editors and collaborators who worked from decades of notes, letters, recorded conversations and other material.

A new volume of Nelson Mandela memoirs goes on sale on Tuesday in 22 countries and 20 languages.

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Conversations with Myself was compiled with the 92-year-old Mandela's blessing by a team of archivists, editors and collaborators who worked from decades of notes, letters, recorded conversations and other material.

The editors promise a personal portrait of the anti-apartheid icon - faults, frailties and all.

In a foreword, US President Barack Obama writes that Mandela, who largely retired from public life in 2004, is inspiring because he is human.

The book ends with a passage from Mandela's unpublished autobiography in which he insists he was never a saint, "even on the basis of an earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying."