Disgrace

Description

INCLUDES A READING GUIDEAfter 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 smallholding.For a time, his daughter'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.

J M Coetzee's work includes Waiting For The Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood- Scenes From Provincial Life, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, Diary of a Bad Year, and, most recently, Summertime. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

What is remarkable about Coetzee's vision as a novelist is that it remains intensely human, rooted in common experience and replete with failure, doubt and frustration * Guardian * A masterpiece...perhaps the best novel to carry off the Booker in a decade -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent * Coetzee captures with appalling skill the white dilemma in South Africa * Daily Telegraph * Disgrace explores the furthest reaches of what it means to be human; it is at the frontier of world literature -- Geoff Dyer * Sunday Telegraph * A great novel by one of the finest authors writing in the English language today * The Times *