The mysterious, masterful new novel from J.M. Coetzee, twice winner of the Booker Prize and winner of the Nobel Prize
J.M. Coetzee’s work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & 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.
Richly enigmatic, with regular flashes of Coetzee's piercing
intelligence
*Guardian*
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’
*Independent*
There are lots of traditions and tales mixed in – along with
mathematics and a wonderfully poetic use of language
*Financial Times*
Engaging and thoughtful
*Tablet*
Written with all of Coetzee’s penetrating rigour, it will be an
early contender for an unprecedented third Booker prize
*Observer*
In this captivating and provocative new novel, a small boy who has been renamed David, and Simon, the man who has become David's caretaker since David was separated from his mother, have immigrated to a nameless country. Simon soon finds work on the docks, is given an apartment for new arrivals, and sets about the impossible task of finding David's mother, whose name they do not know and whose face the boy does not remember. One day, Simon glimpses a woman inside a wealthy household-a woman who very likely isn't David's mother-and becomes instantly, illogically convinced that she should raise the child. He approaches her intent on convincing her to be "a mother" to David; what unfolds is their story: mistakes made in the name of love and choices no one would wish to encounter. Most fascinating is the timeless, almost placeless country itself, which provides the immigrants with essentials-food, shelter, education, and modest employment-but denies them what Simon discovers matters most: irony, sensuality, intensity, and opinion. At times, the questions driving the allegory become almost too explicit, as when Simon asks a woman with whom he has just done the disappointing "business of sex" if "the price we pay for this new life, the price of forgetting, may be too high?" As in the past, Coetzee's (Disgrace) precise prose is at once rich and austere, lean and textured, deceptively straightforward and yet expansive, as he considers what is required, not just of the body, but by the heart. Agent: Rema Dilanyan, Peter Lampack Agency. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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