How do individuals, who are part of a community, respond to the stranger as a stranger: i.e. without simply positioning this outsider in opposition to the community in which they are located? How may individuals receive something unknown and therefore surprising into their world without compromising it by identifying it in the terms of that world? In this study, Mike Marais traces the various ways in which Coetzee's fiction, from Dusklands through to Slow Man, repeatedly poses such questions of hospitality. It is shown that the form of ethical action staged in Coetzee's writing is grounded...