Summertime

Sometimes heartbreaking, often funny, Summertime completes J.M.Coetzee’s majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoirs, begun with Boyhood and Youth.J.M. Coetzee’s (entirely fictional) English biographer gradually reveals an unflattering portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family, he’s regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard and (most damning) the rumours that he writes poetry - all evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time."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. But then, Coetzee is wonderful: edgy, black, remorselessly human, witty, and often outright funny... Summertime is offbeat and deliberate, elusive and truthful." - Irish Times "Both an elegant request that the sum of Coetzee's existence as a public figure be looked for only in his writing, and ample evidence, once again, why that request should be honoured." - The ObserverJohn Maxwell Coetzee is an author and academic from South Africa. He became an Australian citizen in 2006 after relocating there in 2002. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.