Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee became the first author to win the Booker twice with this tale set in post-apartheid South Africa, where a professor’s complacency contributes to his utter downfall. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely tender novel, Coetzee once again tells "truths [that] cut to the bone" (The New York Time Book Review).Refusing to apologise after an impulsive affair with a student, David Lurie, a 52-year-old professor in Cape Town, seeks refuge on his daughter’s farm. Here, a savage and disturbing attack brings into relief the faults in their relationship. Pitching the moral code of political correctness against the values of Romantic poetry, Disgrace examines dichotomies both in personal relationships and in the unaccountability of one culture towards another."Any novel set in post-apartheid South Africa is fated to be read as a political portrait, but the fascination of Disgrace—a somewhat perverse fascination, as some will feel—is the way it both encourages and contests such a reading by holding extreme alternatives in tension. Salvation, ruin. Even a single paragraph can accommodate the transformation of hope into its opposite.” - Adam Mars-Jones, The GuardianJ. M. Coetzee is a multi-award-winning author and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works of fiction include Dusklands; Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honour, the Central News Agency Literary Award; and Life & Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life, and several essay collections. In 1999, he again won the Booker Prize for Disgrace. **A BBC RADIO 4 GOOD READ** 'A great novel by one of the finest authors writing in the English language today' The Times 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 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. **A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK** **One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World** 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, shunned by his friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife. He retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding, where a brief visit becomes an extended stay as he tries to find meaning from the one remaining relationship. David attempts to relate to Lucy and to a society with new racial complexities are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that shakes all of his beliefs and threatens to destroy his daughter. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely tender novel, Coetzee once again tells "truths [that] cut to the bone" (The New York Times Book Review). A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities, he is expected to apologise and repent in an effort to save his job, but he refuses to become a scapegoat in what he see as a show trial designed to reinforce a stringent political correctness.