Contemporary, Epic, South Africa, Fathers and daughters, Veterinarians, Farm life, Domestic fiction, Rape, Teacher-student relationships, Political correctness 

A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities he is expected to apologize to save his job, but instead he refuses and resigns, retiring to live with his daughter on her remote farm. 

Publisher Comments
From the author of Waiting for the Barbarians and the Booker-Prize-winning Life & Times of Michael K, a dazzling new novel – his first in five years.
Disgrace – set in post-apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape – is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A heartbreaking novel about a man and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love.

At fifty-two Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire but lacking in passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and friendless. Except for his daughter, Lucy, who works her smallholding with her neighbor, Petrus, an African farmer now on the way to a modest prosperity. David's attempts to relate to Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities, are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely tender novel, Coetzee once again tells "truths [that] cut to the bone." The New York Times Book Review

Review
"The kind of territory J.M Coetzee has made his own....By this late point in the century, the journey to a heart of narrative darkness has become a safe literary destination....Disgrace goes beyond this to explore the furthest reaches of what it means to be human: it is at the frontier of world literature." Sunday Telegraph
Review
"J.M. Coetzee's distinguished novels feed on exclusion; they are intelligently starved. One always feels with this writer a zeal of omission. What his novels keep out may well be as important as what they keep in. And Coetzee's vision is impressively consistent: his books eschew loosened abundance for impacted allegory. Waiting For The Barbarians, his finest allegory, set in a nameless Empire with resemblances to turn-ofthe-century South Africa, has an Orwellian power. Even when his novels are set in a recognizable and local South African world, as is the case with Coetzee's new novel, the dry seed of parable can always be felt underfoot, beneath the familiar surfaces of contemporary life.

"But this is a harsh exchange. Coetzee's novels eschew society, and the examination of domestic filaments, for the study of political societies..." The New Republic

About the Author
J. M. Coetzee's books include Boyhood, Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Foe, and The Master of Petersburg. Coetzee's many literary awards include the CNA Prize (South Africa's premier literary award), the Booker Prize, the Prix Etranger Femina, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize 

Genre/Form: Domestic fiction
Fiction
Material Type: Fiction
Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: J M Coetzee

ISBN: 0436204894 9780436204890
OCLC Number: 670289096
Awards: Winner of The Commonwealth Writers Prize 2000
Winner of Booker Prize for Fiction 1999
Short-listed for Best of the Booker 2008
Short-listed for WH Smith Literary Prize 2000
Short-listed for WH Smith Annual Literary Award 2000
Description: 219 pages ; 14 x 22 cm