After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, 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's isolated farm. For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonize his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and...

A collection of 29 pieces on books, writing, photography, and the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa. With literary subjects ranging from Defoe through Rilke and Kafka to the giants of the 20th century, those who admire Coetzee as a novelist can also read his literary criticism.

Revisiting the South Africa of half a century ago, the author of 'In the Heart of the Country' writes about his childhood and interior life. This is the first volume of memoirs from one of this century's greatest literary talents.

A specialist in pyschological warefare is driven to breakdown and madness by the stressed of a project of macabre ingenuity to win the war in Vietnam. A meglomaniac Boer frontiersman wreaks hideous vengence on a Hottentot tribe for undermining the 'natural' order of his universe with their anarchic rival order, mocking him and subjecting him to the humiliations of his own all too palpable flesh. Both the 18th century Jacobus Coetzee and the 20th century Euguene Dawn are in the business of pushing back the frontiers of knowledge and are dealers in death who denounce their own humanity and...

A searing portrait of a young colonial in early 1960s London -- from the two-time winner of the Booker Prize.
Youth's narrator, a student in 1950s South Africa, has long been plotting an escape from his native country. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art.
Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer from which random,...

Elizabeth Costello is a humane, moral, and uncompromising creation.
The subject of J.M. Coetzee's latest work of fiction is an Australian writer of international renown -- feted, studied and honoured. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation and from which, it seems, she will never escape, she has reached the stage, late in life, where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded.
One of a new breed of intellectual nomads, her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world -- a private...

For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and his Empire. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy with the victims and an act of rebellion which sees him imprisoned as an enemy of the state.

Set in 1869, when Dostoevsky was summoned from Germany to St Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, this novel is both a compelling mystery steeped in the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Russia and a meditation on authority and rebellion, art and imagination.

In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. Life and Times of Michael K goes to the centre of human experience -- the need for an interior, spiritual life, for some connections to the world in which we live, and for purity of vision.

A masterful new novel from one of the greatest writers alive.
Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends.
He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian...