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Features

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

The Pole and Other Stories

In this beautifully written and compulsively readable story of love and the mutability of human relationships, pianist Witold's infatuation with Beatriz will change them both. 
 
A Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and Financial Times Book of the Year 
 
‘Confirms Coetzee as one of the great writers of fiction’ Observer 
 
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. 
 
‘One of the world’s most original writers… He is still breaking new ground at the same time as revealing a funny side’ i 
 
‘His prose, apparently simple, is so perfected at every turn that it is moving to read, line after line’ Sunday Times

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

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.

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.

A BBC Radio 4 Good Read

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.

Age of Iron

Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker prize-winning author of Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee tells the remarkable story of a nation gripped in brutal apartheid in Age of Iron. 
 
In Cape Town, South Africa, an elderly classics professor writes a letter to her distant daughter, recounting the strange and disturbing events of her dying days. She has been opposed to the lies and the brutality of apartheid all her life, but now she finds herself coming face to face with its true horrors: the hounding by the police of her servant's son, the burning of a nearby black township, the murder by security forces of a teenage activist who seeks refuge in her house. Through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man who one day appears on her doorstep. 
 
In Age of Iron, J. M. Coetzee brings his searing insight and masterful control of language to bear on one of the darkest episodes of our times. 
 
'Quite simply a magnificent and unforgettable work' Daily Telegraph 
 
'A superbly realized novel whose truth cuts to the bone' The New York Times 
 
'A remarkable work by a brilliant writer' Wall Street Journal

It is, quite simply, a magnificent and unforgettable work

A superbly realised novel whose truth cuts to the bone

A fierce pageant of modern South Africa ... A remarkable work by a brilliant writer

Coetzee is one of the greatest writers of our time ... Age of Iron is taut, ironic, grieving and, finally, astonishing

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1940. The author of some fifteen novels and winner of numerous awards, Coetzee is the first author to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice: for Life &amp; Times of Michael K in 1983 and for Disgrace in 1999. In 2003 he was awared the Nobel Prize in Literature. He lives in Australia.

In Cape Town, South Africa, an elderly classics professor writes a letter to her distant daughter, recounting the strange and disturbing events of her dying days. She has been opposed to the lies and brutality of apartheid all her life, but now she finds herself coming face-to-face with its true horrors: the hounding by the police of her servant's son, the burning of a nearby black township, the murder by security forces of a teenage activist who seeks refuge in her house. Through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man who one day appears on her doorstep. 
 
In Age of Iron, J. M. Coetzee brings his searing insight and masterful control of language to bear on one of the darkest episodes of our times.

Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy

The Good Story

A fascinating dialogue on the human inclination to make up stories between a Nobel Prize-winning writer and a psychotherapist.

It is the Man Booker prize-winning novelist’s agenda that drives the absorbing discussions of this book. Kurtz’s pieces are replies to Coetzee’s questions, and as such are insightful for both [psychoanalysis and novel-writing]

Coetzee and Kurtz range freely across space and time, from ancient spells of bewitchment to the "confessions" of celebrities in magazines. Their arguments have a meditative quality, challenging, and helpfully open-ended

Coetzee’s writing is characteristically spare and penetrating… Kurtz proves both a lucid expositor and an evocative literary stylist, bringing psychoanalytic ideas and practices to life with rare precision and immediacy

[Arabella Kurtz] writes with wonderful eloquence about imagination and the self, parrying Coetzee's relentless unmasking with her gently intelligent demurral

Coetzee is an exceptionally clear thinker, and his gift for expressing complex concepts through considered, precise prose is impressive

J. M. Coetzee’s work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life &amp; Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace, Summertime and The Childhood of Jesus. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. 
 
Arabella Kurtz is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and is completing psychoanalytic psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Clinic. She has held various posts in NHS adult and forensic mental health services and is currently Senior Clinical Tutor on the University of Leicester clinical psychology training course.

The Good Story is an exchange between a writer with a longstanding interest in moral psychology and a psychotherapist with a training in literary studies. J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both their approaches is a concern with stories. 
 
Working alone, the writer is in sole charge of the story he or she tells. The therapist, on the other hand, collaborates with the patient in telling the story of their life. What kind of truth do the stories created by patient and therapist aim to uncover: objective truth or the shifting and subjective truth of memories explored and re-experienced in the safety of the therapeutic relationship? 
 
Drawing on great writers like Cervantes and Dostoevsky and on psychoanalysts like Freud and Melanie Klein, the authors offer illuminating insights into the stories we tell of our lives.

Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker prize-winning author of Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee reimagines Daniel DeFoe's classic novel Robinson Crusoe in Foe. Published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 
 
In an act of breathtaking imagination, J.M Coetzee radically reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe. 
 
In the early eighteenth century, Susan Barton finds herself adrift from a mutinous ship and cast ashore on a remote desert island. There she finds shelter with its only other inhabitants: a man named Cruso and his tongueless slave, Friday. In time, she builds a life for herself as Cruso's companion and, eventually, his lover. At last they are rescued by a passing ship, but only she and Friday survive the journey back to London. 
 
Determined to have her story told, she pursues the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe in the hope that he will relate truthfully her memories to the world. But with Cruso dead, Friday incapable of speech and Foe himself intent on reshaping her narrative, Barton struggles to maintain her grip on the past, only to fall victim to the seduction of storytelling itself. 
 
Treacherous, elegant and unexpectedly moving, Foe remains one of the most exquisitely composed of this pre-eminent author's works. 
 
'A small miracle of a book. . . of marvellous intricacy and overwhelming power' Washington Post 
 
'A superb novel' The New York Times

A small miracle of a book...of marvellous intricacy and overwhelming power

A finely honed testament to its author's intelligence, imagination and skill

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1940. The author of some fifteen novels and winner of numerous awards, Coetzee is the first author to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice: for Life &amp; Times of Michael K in 1983 and for Disgrace in 1999. In 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He lives in Australia.

In the early eighteenth century, a woman finds herself set adrift from a mutinous ship and cast ashore on a remote desert island. There she finds shelter with its only other inhabitants: a man named Cruso and his tongueless slave Friday. In time, she builds a life for herself as Cruso's companion and, eventually, his lover. At last, they are rescued by a passing ship, but only she and Friday survive the journey back to London. 
 
Determined to have her story told, she pursues the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe in the hope that he will truthfully relate her memories to the world. But with Cruso dead, Friday incapable of speech and Foe himself intent on reshaping her narrative, Barton struggles to maintain her grip on the past, only to fall victim to the seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself.

Letters

Here and Now

A collection of letters between two of the greatest writers of our time, J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster.

Uniquely insightful, unfailingly interesting

How gripping it is to watch these two thoughtful, articulate men grappling with a world that hasn't quite turned out how they expected

These pages are at their most compelling when the respective writers begin to dwell on the currency of their fiction

You feel that Auster and Coetzee are addressing each other directly and honestly. Some of it is rather moving, and underpinning it all is genuine affection

A friendship played out in letters... It's fun and strangely gripping

As engaging as you'd expect... This is an ideal book to keep by the bed and dip into from time to time

In an era of instant communication, this thoughtful collection is a real treat… A thought-provoking and satisfying book

Although Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee had been reading each other's books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a letter from Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular basis and, 'God willing, strike sparks off each other.' 
 
Here and Now is the result of that proposal: an epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends. Over three years their letters touched on nearly every subject, from sports to fatherhood, film festivals to incest, philosophy to politics, from the financial crisis to art, family, marriage, friendship, and love. 
 
Their correspondence offers an intimate and often amusing portrait of these two men as they explore the complexities of the here and now and is a reflection of two sharp intellects whose pleasure in each other's friendship is apparent on every page.

Summertime

A rich, funny, and deeply affecting autobiographical new novel from one of the world's greatest living writers.

Wonderful stuff. But then, Coetzee is wonderful: edgy, black, remorselessly human, witty, and often outright funny... Summertime is offbeat and deliberate, elusive and truthful

The cumulative effect of Coetzee's unblinking honesty and his never-wavering seriousness is an understanding of the creation of a great writer

A subtle, allusive meditation: an intriguing map of a weak character's constricted heart struggling against the undertow of suspicion within South Africa's claustrophobic, unpoetic, overtly macho society

A poignant, cubistic portrait...It is not essential, however, that one know anything of Boyhood, Youth, or his other works to appreciate its rich offerings as an imaginatively distorted and distorting portrait of the artist as outsider

Compelling, funny, moving and full of life

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on a period in the seventies when, the biographer senses, Coetzee was 'finding his feet as a writer'. He embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to Coetzee - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. Thus emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual, regarded as an outsider within the family. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, and rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.

Diary of a Bad Year

Diary of a Bad Year is an utterly contemporary work of fiction from one of our greatest writers and deepest thinkers. It addresses the profound unease of countless people in democracies across the world.

Coetzee is redrawing the contours of the novel and taking it places that it has rarely been before... Exhilarating

An eminent, ageing Australian writer is invited to contribute to a book entitled Strong Opinions. For him, troubled by Australia's complicity in the wars in the Middle East,it is a chance to air some urgent concerns: how should a citizen of a modern democracy react to their state's involvement in an immoral war on terror, a war that involves the use of torture? 
 
Then in the laundry room of his apartment block he encounters an alluring young woman. He offers her work typing up his manuscript. Anya is not interested in politics, but the job will be a welcome distraction, as will the writer's evident attraction towards her. Her boyfriend, Alan, is an investment consultant who understands the world in harsh economic terms. Suspicious of his trophy girlfriend's new pastime, Alan begins to formulate a plan...

Literary Essays 2000-2005

Inner Workings

A collection of essays on literature by one of the world's finest writers: a must read.

The essays here are welcoming, informative, readable, lucid, plain, purged of jargon... Coetzee is a critic of unbiddable integrity

Literary criticism of the highest order...will be read and valued by anyone interested in the inner workings of literature for decades to come

Fans will relish his precise, restrained style of literary criticism...communicating Coetzee's passion for literature

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

Following on from Stranger Shores, which contained J.M. Coetzee's essays from 1986 to 1999, Inner Workings gathers together his literary essays from 2000 to 2005. 
 
Of the writers discussed in the first half of the book, several - Italo Svevo, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Sandor Marai - lived through the Austro-Hungarian fin de siècle and felt the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. Coetzee further explores the work of six of twentieth-century German literature's greatest writers: Robert Musil, Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin (the Arcades Project), Joseph Roth, Gunter Grass, W.G. Sebald, and the poet Paul Celan in his 'wrestlings with the German language'. 
 
There is an essay on Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and on the short fiction of Samuel Beckett, a writer whom Coetzee has long admired. American literature is strongly represented from Walt Whitman, through William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller to Philip Roth. Coetzee rounds off the collection with essays on three fellow Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez and V.S. Naipaul.

Slow Man

Nobel laureate Coetzee's brillant account of a reclusive man in his sixties, forced to confront his resentment for what his life has become after the unexpected arrival of a famed writer.

Sensational... Another exemplary tale of suffering from one of the best writers of our time, who dares to articulate our incomprehensible existence, and manages it with extraordinary and sensitive eloquence

[Slow Man] finds the Nobel laureate on top form... A consummate writer of fiction

Coetzee is a unique voice; no novelist explores the ideas and the power of literature and the sense of displacement so boldly. Slow Man will add to his immense reputation

Remorselessly human, it is also funny and touching: Coetzee the artist remains the complete novelist

A tremendous and startling novel... Coetzee is a novelist who cares about every word. Slow Man confirms him as among our greatest living authors

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 novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart.

Life and Times of Michael K

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2003

It strikes deep inside the heart...The story is clean, clear, straight, the work of a mature imagination at full power...here is a book that will be celebrated for a long time

Beautifully written in a strong, plain, unpretentious style...distinguished by grim humour and powerful understatement

The quality of Coetzee's writing lies in his inner vision: dark, passionately compassionate, concerned with the nature of man

Possibly my favourite book of all time, mostly because of the taut, sparse prose. It generates a stunning effect. There is simply not a word out of place – and every word resonates with meaning

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. 
 
'This is a truly astonishing novel... I finished Life &amp; Times of Michael K in a state of elation, for all the misery and suffering it contains. I cannot recommend it highly enough' Evening Standard

The Master of Petersburg

A fascinating insight into the mind of Dostoevsky, as imagined by Coetzee – Nobel-Prize winner and one of our greatest living writers.

Hugely impressive-Coetzee never puts a foot wrong

Anyone interested in the power of fiction to move us and extend our sense of life should get hold of this book

A stunning account of the relation of writers and events-A harsh and eloquent critique of the human condition. It is also a subtle, powerful, superbly written personal testament. The bleakness of vision is tempered only by the certainty that life can be material for art. This is art. The case is proven

Both a gripping mystery and a meditation on the relationship between art and life

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2003 
 
In The Master of Petersburg J. M. Coetzee dares to imagine the life of Dostoevsky. Set in 1869, when Dostoevsky was summoned from Germany to St Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, this novel is at once a compelling mystery steeped in the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Russia and a brilliant and courageous meditation on authority and rebellion, art and imagination. Dostoevsky is seen obsessively following his stepson's ghost, trying to ascertain whether he was a suicide or a murder victim and whether he loved or despised his stepfather.

In the Heart of the Country

An intense, unsettling, remarkable novel of a mind in decline from a writer unparralleled in fiction.

A powerful study of lust, degradation and fantasy

It says something about the loneliness, about the craving for love, about the relation between master and slave and between white and black, and about man's earthly anguish and longing for salvation - in a way you do not easily escape from once it has gripped you

The writing and mood are a remarkable piece of sustained intensity... One false word could have ruined this short tour de force completely. It never does

An intellectual lyric which sings the absence of history, the electric lull before history breaks... As a piece of cultural psychoanalysis and diagnosis, it's glitteringly precise

Stifled by the torpor of colonial South Africa and trapped in a web of reciprocal oppression, a lonely sheep farmer seeks comfort in the arms of a black concubine. But when his embittered spinster daughter Magda feels shamed, this lurch across the racial divide marks the end of a tenuous feudal peace. 
 
As she dreams madly of bloody revenge, Magda's consciousness starts to drift and the line between fact and the workings of her excited imagination becomes blurred. What follows is the fable of a woman's passionate, obsessed and violent response to an Africa that will not heed her.

Waiting for the Barbarians

‘A remarkable and original book’ Graham Greene

Brilliant . . . The story of an imaginary Empire, set in an unspecified place and time . . . A realistic fable, at once exciting and economical . . . A distinguished piece of fiction

A writer of formidable strength. His novel is important not only for its theme but also for the beauty and clarity of his style

I have known few authors who can evoke such a wilderness in the heart of man . . . Coetzee knows the elusive terror of Kafka

J.M. Coetzee’s vision goes to the nerve centre of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys it with a brilliant writer’s mastery of tension and elegance

A powerful – even prophetic – intelligence at work

This is a voice at once authoritative and subtle: a very powerful combination

The modern classic from double Booker Prize winner J.M. Coetzee – soon to be a major film starring Mark Rylance, Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp 
 
For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy with the victims and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison, branded as an enemy of the state. Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegory of oppressor and oppressed. Not just a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times, the Magistrate is an analogue of all men living in complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.

Elizabeth Costello

Elizabeth Costello is a humane, moral, and uncompromising creation; a masterful novel that offers us a profound and delicate vision of literary celebrity, artistry and the private life of the mind.

One of Coetzee's best...simply burns with creative passion

Probably the best book on the [Booker] longlist, the one that will last... Every word counts. Every sentence lives

The best novel I've read this year, a book so bold and so clever that one wants to call it something other than a novel, to take it out of that commonplace genre

A readable and engaging book. Demanding, playful, provocative...hugely enlightening and rewarding

Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation, she has reached the stage where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded. 
 
Her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American college where she is required to deliver a lecture; a sojourn as the writer in residence on a cruise liner; a visit to her sister, a missionary in Africa, who is receiving an honorary degree, an occasion which both recognise as the final opportunity for effecting some form of reconciliation; and a disquieting appearance at a writers' conference in Amsterdam where she finds the subject of her talk unexpectedly amongst the audience. 
 
She has made her life's work the study of other people yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny. But, for her, what matters is the continuing search for a means of articulating her vision and the verdict of future generations.

J M Coetzee

Mariana Dimópulos

A thoughtful, elegant dialogue… the rare treat of hearing an author and translator given nearly equal time and billing in open-ended conversation

So enjoyable and stimulating, and it made me probe more deeply, or differently, my own relationship with the languages I grew up speaking

Sunjeev Sahota, Booker-shortlisted author of THE CHINA ROOM

This is a book about languages, what languages can and what they cannot do. 
 
In this dialogue between a Nobel Laureate and a leading translator, provocative ideas emerge about the evolution of language and the challenge of translation.Language, historically speaking, has always been slippery. Two dictionaries provide two different maps of the universe: which one is true, or are both false? Speaking in Tongues - taking the form of a dialogue between Nobel-Laureate novelist J. M. Coetzee and eminent translator Mariana Dimópulos - explores questions that have constantly plagued writers and translators, now more than ever. Among them: 
<ul><li>How can a translator liberate meanings imprisoned in the language of a text?</li><li>Why is the masculine form dominant in gendered languages while the feminine is treated as a deviation?</li><li>How should we counter the spread of monolingualism?</li><li>Should a translator censor racist or misogynistic language?</li><li>Does mathematics tell the truth about everything?</li></ul>In the tradition of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay 'The Task of the Translator', Speaking in Tongues emerges as an engaging and accessible work of philosophy, shining a light on some of the most important linguistic and philological issues of our time.

J M Coetzee

Praise for Speaking in Tongues

A thoughtful, elegant dialogue… the rare treat of hearing an author and translator given nearly equal time and billing in open-ended conversation

So enjoyable and stimulating, and it made me probe more deeply, or differently, my own relationship with the languages I grew up speaking

[Speaking in Tongues] enhance[s] our appreciation of what’s actually involved in turning one language into another… a spry exchange… in absorbing detail

A thoughtful, elegant dialogue… the rare treat of hearing an author and translator given nearly equal time and billing in open-ended conversation

So enjoyable and stimulating, and it made me probe more deeply, or differently, my own relationship with the languages I grew up speaking

[Speaking in Tongues] enhance[s] our appreciation of what’s actually involved in turning one language into another… a spry exchange… in absorbing detail

A thoughtful, elegant dialogue… the rare treat of hearing an author and translator given nearly equal time and billing in open-ended conversation

So enjoyable and stimulating, and it made me probe more deeply, or differently, my own relationship with the languages I grew up speaking

[Speaking in Tongues] enhance[s] our appreciation of what’s actually involved in turning one language into another… a spry exchange… in absorbing detail

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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