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What ‘Disgrace’ was telling us before we were ready to listen

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Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life &amp; Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace, Summertime, The Childhood of Jesus and, most recently, The Schooldays of Jesus. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.

After years teaching Romantic poetry in Cape Town, David Lurie has an impulsive affair with a student. 
 
The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy&rsquo;s isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter&rsquo;s influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship. 
 
'A great novel by one of the finest authors writing in the English language today' The Times 
 
'At the frontier of world literature' Sunday Telegraph 
 
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

The Death of Jesus

A new masterwork completes the trilogy begun with The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus

Anything J.M. Coetzee writes deserves our full attention…The Death of Jesus is full of truth, irreducible, tearfully moving to read

Concludes the trilogy with force and heart… if The Death of Jesus strikes you in the right place, then you will read its cool, dry final sentences – as I did – with tears in your eyes

Any new novel from Coetzee commands respect, and the final part of the trilogy is no exception… The Death of Jesus constantly challenges what we believe and why

The Death of Jesus is a necessary read, casting a strange new light on one of the world’s greatest and most elusive novelists

A phenomenon that arrives from out of nowhere and challenges our received ideas to breaking point ... a delicate, iridescent mystery

A formidably intelligent writer who synthesizes millennia of thought into intricate multilayered narratives

An extraordinary new novel… The Death of Jesus is the best in the series

Coetzee always writes with pace and precision. His otherworldly landscapes have a gritty, scuffed plausibility. Never overlook the deadpan comedy, either: he learned from Samuel Beckett, an early idol

A remarkable achievement by a writer whose evolution, at the age of 79, continues to surprise

The enigmatic final instalment of Coetzee's trilogy of novels...is a triumph: subtle, philosophical and playful

J.M. Coetzee’s work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life &amp; Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace, Summertime, The Childhood of Jesus and, most recently, The Schooldays of Jesus. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.

The luminous new novel from 'one of the best writers of our time', double Booker Prize winner J. M. Coetzee. 
 
'Full of truth, tearfully moving to read... Brilliant' Evening Standard 
 
Simón and David - a tall ten-year-old - are in a new land, together with a woman named Inés. The small family have found a home in which David can thrive. 
 
But David is spotted by Julio Fabricante, the director of a local orphanage, playing football with his friends. He shows unusual talent. When David announces that he wants to live with Julio and the children in his care, Simón and Inés are stunned. David is leaving them, and they can only love him and bear witness. 
 
The Death of Jesus is the completion of an incomparable trilogy in which J. M. Coetzee explores the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions. 
 
* A New York Times Notable Book * 
___________________ 
 
'Extraordinary... Coetzee stands as the pre-eminent novelist in the English-writing world' New Statesman 
 
'You will read its cool, dry final sentences - as I did - with tears in your eyes' The Times

The Schooldays of Jesus

An intriguing and wonderful novel from the Booker and Nobel-prize-winning author of Disgrace.

Compelling, often very funny, full of sudden depths

It is written with the coolness and limpidity that makes Coetzee a master... There were moments where I found it almost too affecting to read

It’s compulsively enigmatic but surprisingly funny too.

Coetzee doesn't want to be understood, or explained. He wants, merely, to be read. The Schooldays of Jesus is, indeed, very readable

The book’s interest comes almost entirely from its strangeness – its world continues to be charmingly, earnestly weird.

He is a proven master with an increasingly wilful streak, always a writer to excite, while for a reader with a fondness for backing a good horse, here it is. While it is always dangerous to push an as yet unpublished work, but in the case of Coetzee, this could be a book of the year, never mind an expected contender.

[It is] surprisingly involving...richly suggestive.

Freed from literary convention, Mr Coetzee writes not to provide answers, but to ask great questions.

It’s a subtly different project from the strenuous fictions that won Coetzee his Nobel and two Man Booker prizes: still intense but, by his standards, a bit rambling yet oddly focused. Perhaps what we’re seeing is Coetzee having fun. There are certainly times in the novel...when I pictured the ghost of a smile behind the page.

It will keep you philosophically and morally on the edge of your seat throughout.

[It] is pleasingly baffling, suggesting hidden depths and multiple layers without ever quite revealing them.

What stands out, and stays with you, is the fable-like aura which makes this feel like a children’s book for adults.

Coetzee doesn’t want to be understood, or explained. He wants, merely, to be read. The Schooldays of Jesus is, indeed, very readable.

The prose is limpid, the plot simple, the style hypnotic, but what it all means I wouldn’t like to say.

From the double Booker Prize-winning author of Disgrace, an astonishing novel of new beginnings and the troubles of youth. 
 
'Brilliant... Tenaciously absorbing' Daily Telegraph 
 
David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language, he has begun to make friends and he has the big dog Bolívar to watch over him. 
 
But he'll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. Yet it's here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what adults are capable of. 
 
The Schooldays of Jesus is a mesmerising tale about growing up, and about the choices we are forced to make in our lives. 
 
'Compelling, often very funny, full of sudden depths' Observer 
 
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2016

The Childhood of Jesus

The mysterious, masterful new novel from J.M. Coetzee, twice winner of the Booker Prize and winner of the Nobel Prize

Richly enigmatic, with regular flashes of Coetzee's piercing intelligence

As ever, JM Coetzee manages to dodge every category with mesmeric cunning... This limpid, gnomic and surprisingly witty tale will take root in your imagination’

There are lots of traditions and tales mixed in – along with mathematics and a wonderfully poetic use of language

Written with all of Coetzee’s penetrating rigour, it will be an early contender for an unprecedented third Booker prize

Double Booker Prize-winner Coetzee's fable has a dream-like, Kafkaesque quality. Are we in some kind of heaven, purgatory or simply another staging post of existence? Clear answers are elusive, but this is a riveting, thought-provoking read and surely Coetzee's best novel since Disgrace more than a decade ago

A fine, haunting novel that gets under your skin and into your marrow

The Childhood of Jesus represents a return to the allegorical mode that made him famous... The Childhood of Jesus does ample justice to his giant reputation: it’s richly enigmatic, with regular flashes of Coetzee’s piercing intelligence

He’s not quite the Messiah but J.M. Coeztee is a devilishly clever novelist… J.M. Coetzee fashions prose of a lapidary clarity and grace… Coetzee has returned to the (paradoxically) clear and yet opaque fable mode of master-works such as Waiting for the Barbarians. Given the title, one might expect a bleak retelling of gospel stories…but Coetzee never makes things so simple for disciples

This book will continue to act, silently and unexpectedly, on the reader’s imagination.  It unpicks the Christian myth and braids it together with folk tales, the early novel, Pythagorean mysticism, Platonic philosophy, Buddhist epigrams, mathematics – powerful and poetic languages that underwrite our world

As well as an intriguing literary and metaphysical puzzle, the book is also one of profound and painful humanity, preoccupied with some of the most essential questions about what it means to be a parent and what happens when noble principles are confronted with the grubby details of everyday life

It's a relief after reading a lot of contemporary fiction to come across the sober prose of Coetzee. He doesn't shout at you... He knows what he's doing... The whole novel is a kind of escape act, an elaborate rope trick... magical

This  is a book to make you think. This is a book to forcefully turn you away from mindless entertainment and set you on a journey  inwards, where you ask yourself the important questions in life. It's  philosophy as fiction... Part  of his achievement is down to how fit for purpose his prose is. It is  remarkably sparse and yet feels dense, weighted with layers and layers  of meaning

[A] moving but mysterious story of a lost childhood... Is it possible to be deeply affected by a book without really knowing what it's about? Before reading J.M. Coetzee's new novel I might have said no - but now I'm not so sure... [As] disquieting as it is moving... [All] I can say is that ever since I finished it, it's been going round and round inside my head like nothing else I've read in ages

What JM Coetzee writes matters... [A narrative mode] akin to that of Kafka... At once lucid and elusive

Reading  JM Coetzee is like swimming in a sea with a calm surface and a savage  undertow.  His sentences are lean; his subjects menacing: power, race,  animal rights and confession

Tormented states of mind, ambivalence and guilt stalk his work, as do the dual influences of Kafka and Beckett

A retelling of the gospels? A fable about Utopian, Chaves-style socialism? Coeztee moves in mysterious, but mesmerising, ways

There are knotty concerns here on reading, on order and chaos, on political engagement, on almost anything you can think of. But, “you think too much,” Elena says to Simón. “This has nothing to do with thinking.”... What Coetzee has given us is a book not of answers but of questions... Coetzee’s prose is clean and efficient, driving the reader on through the mazy stasis of life in Novilla. There is plenty of what, to avoid a cliché, we might call Kafkaish stuff... These qualities, combined with the enjoyable and unaccustomed exercise of thinking about the book – wanting to think about it – all the way through, meant that in a strange sense, The Childhood of Jesus is the most fun I’ve had with a novel in ages

There aren’t many subjects bigger than the question of faith – and with The Childhood of Jesus, Coetzee appears to have found a subject worthy of his high-level craftsmanship

A perversely comic, intellectually profound and obscurely allegorical novel

From the double Booker Prize-winning author of Disgrace, 'a moving story of lost childhood' (Sunday Telegraph). 
 
After crossing oceans, a man and a boy - both strangers to each other - arrive in a new land. David, the boy, has lost his mother and Simón vows to look after him. In this strange country they are each assigned a new name, a new birthday, a new life. 
 
Knowing nothing of their surroundings, nor the language or customs, they are determined to find David's mother. Though the boy has no memory of her, Simón is certain he will recognise her at first sight. 'But after we find her,' David asks, 'what are we here for?' 
 
The Childhood of Jesus is a profound, beautiful and continually surprising novel from a very great writer. 
 
'Powerful and poetic... This book will continue to act, silently and unexpectedly, on the reader's imagination' Financial Times

Scenes from Provincial Life

Scenes from Provincial Life brings together, in one volume, J.M. Coetzee’s majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime

Described with such skill, such exactitude and such relentlessness that I found myself gasping for air... Coetzee has achieved something universal in his work... A fine book, probably the best description of a childhood I have ever read

A memorable picture of the harshness London can offer to incomers... Youth is a wonderful book: a portrait of the artist as a young man, to rank with any in the canon

This is the third instalment of a life so reserved, so repressed, so seething with polite rage and restrained despair that it could only be approached through a third-person voice...it is wonderful stuff

The publication of Coetzee's trilogy of fictionalised memoir - Boyhood, Youth and Summertime - in one handsome volume highlights the uneasy relationship between the reality of his life and the fiction of his books

Scenes from Provincial Life brings together, in one volume, J.M. Coetzee’s majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime 
 
It opens in a small town in the South Africa of the 1940s. We meet a young boy who, at home, is ill at ease with his father and stifled by his mother’s unconditional love. At school he passes every test that is set for him, but he remains wary of his fellow pupils. Later, as a student of mathematics in Cape Town he prepares to escape to Europe and turn himself into an artist. Once in London, however, the reality is dispiriting. Decades on, an English biographer researches a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. As he interviews important figures in Coetzee’s life, a portrait emerges of an awkward outsider who – even after death – remains dogged by rumours.

2006 - 2017

Late Essays

A fascinating collection of essays on literary subjects ranging from Daniel Defoe to Samuel Beckett by a Nobel and Booker Prize-winning writer

A writer of JM Coetzee’s stature needs no preamble… This book emerges as an engaging series of master classes in novel writing, from which we might distil a selection of dos and don’ts

J.M. Coetzee's essays are filtered through boundless reserves of knowledge, wisdom and reading...A spare, dry sense of humour...Not a single page goes by in this collection when you don't learn something

Coetzee remains a highly original thinker, able to take a much-dissected novel such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and offer an appreciation that stretches the boundaries of the reading experience. The most intriguing essay is one on Philip Roth, a rare occasion where Coetzee tackles one of his contemporaries

His essays are models of clarity, judicious reasoning, and respectful attention… a kind of sage who brings composure to bear on the earthquake zones of mind and heart. He is a master of prose’s lucidities, all the while cognisant of the hidden presence of poetry… Late Essays gives you the feeling that Coetzee has come to look into the eyes of writers, the better to read them with the justice they deserve

His interest is in delving into the writer’s mind, the circumstances surrounding the work and the thinking processes that led to writerly choices in terms of form, style, and themes...Above all, he brings the perspective of one who has much to teach us about slow reading.

This book of criticism casts all sort of gleaming spotlights, amid the shadows, from one of the major novelistic intelligences of our time. If you make the effort, it will shine and shine.

Over the course of his career, Coetzee has accumulated a large body of writing on literary topics, which is of interest not only for the measured clarity of his arguments and judgments, but for the light it sheds on his creative work

Coetzee's third collection of literary essays, originally published as book introductions and reviews, is as entertaining as it is accessible.

The scale of Coetzee's reading makes most British criticism seem dully provincial

Coetzee the critic is every bit as good as Coetzee the novelist

A fascinating collection of essays on literary subjects ranging from Daniel Defoe to Samuel Beckett by a Nobel and Booker Prize-winning writer 
 
Late Essays gathers together J.M. Coetzee’s literary essays from 2006 to 2017. The subjects covered in this stunning collection range from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Coetzee’s contemporary Philip Roth. Coetzee has had a long-standing interest in German literature and here he engages with the work of Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist and Walser. There are four fascinating essays on fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett and he looks at the work of three Australian writers: Patrick White, Les Murray and Gerald Murnane. There are essays too on Tolstoy’s great novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, on Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary, and on the Argentine modernist Antonio Di Benedetto.

J M Coetzee

If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing... Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousness, humour, and grand, existential strangeness

In The Pole, Coetzee forges an autofiction of contemplation, in which thought and inquiry take precedence over melodrama — because time is running out

These stories are… touched with a moral intensity… striking

JM Coetzee is a great writer, perhaps one of the greatest still around… This is Coetzee at his most lugubrious and beguiling: if it turns out to be one of his last works, it can easily claim to be one of the best occasional utterings from a novelist who is as notoriously reclusive in person as he is piercingly acute in writing

The Pole…confirms Coetzee as one of the great writers of fiction… [and] shows that, at 83 years old, there is no diminishing of his talents. Long may he darken our pages with prose

This book, like all of his work, operates at a bracing, invigorating level, like a dunk in ice-cold water – or, as he writes, “Like driving into an allegory!”

[An] elegant, elegiac collection… [and] thought-provoking as ever

The Pole and Other Stories, a collection of one novella and five tales, finds him [Coetzee], at 83, as good as ever, pursuing the ethical and artistic questions that have animated his whole career… this book feels unified, and has lateness written all over it

This book is a late-career gem by one of the world’s most original writers and shows that he is still breaking new ground at the same time as revealing a funny side that may have been there all along

[In this] late-in-life collection by the South African master… not a phrase [is] wasted, everything sharp and back-to-the-bone

Perhaps the greatest novelist alive… Coetzee’s prose, apparently simple, is so perfected at every turn that it is moving to read, line after line

The Pole is one of the best books of the year by any author of any age, exhibiting not the slightest diminution in his powers… here is not a sentence that is difficult to understand, and yet the book provokes thought and wonder on every page

After his piano recital in Barcelona, Witold Walczykiewicz – white-haired virtuoso, controversial interpreter of Chopin – becomes infatuated with Beatriz, his designated companion at dinner. Beatriz, a stylish patron of the arts, is at first unmoved. But as the stranger’s letters, music, and poetry flood into her home, a dream of love begins that surprises them both.

J M Coetzee

Praise for The Pole and Other Stories

**If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing...** Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousnes ...

In The Pole, Coetzee forges an autofiction of contemplation, in which thought and inquiry take precedence over melodrama — because time is running out

These stories are… touched with a moral intensity… striking

**If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing...** Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousnes ...

In The Pole, Coetzee forges an autofiction of contemplation, in which thought and inquiry take precedence over melodrama — because time is running out

These stories are… touched with a moral intensity… striking

**If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing...** Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousnes ...

In The Pole, Coetzee forges an autofiction of contemplation, in which thought and inquiry take precedence over melodrama — because time is running out

These stories are… touched with a moral intensity… striking

Books by J M Coetzee

Articles featuring J M Coetzee

What ‘Disgrace’ was telling us before we were ready to listen

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Praise for The Pole and Other Stories

If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing... Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousnes ...

In The Pole, Coetzee forges an autofiction of contemplation, in which thought and inquiry take precedence over melodrama — because time is running out

These stories are… touched with a moral intensity… striking

If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing... Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousnes ...

In The Pole, Coetzee forges an autofiction of contemplation, in which thought and inquiry take precedence over melodrama — because time is running out

These stories are… touched with a moral intensity… striking

If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing... Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousnes ...

In The Pole, Coetzee forges an autofiction of contemplation, in which thought and inquiry take precedence over melodrama — because time is running out

These stories are… touched with a moral intensity… striking

Books by J M Coetzee

Articles featuring J M Coetzee

What ‘Disgrace’ was telling us before we were ready to listen

**If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing...** Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousnes ...

**If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing...** Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousnes ...

**If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing...** Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousnes ...