Shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize
A brilliant new work of fiction from the Nobel Prize-winning author of "Disgrace" and "Diary of a Bad Year"
A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father-a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him. These accounts add up to an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it hard to make meaningful connections with the people around him.
"Summertime" is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. Incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny, "Summertime" is a compelling work by one of today's most esteemed writers.
- ISBN10 0670021385
- ISBN13 9780670021383
- Publish Date 7 January 2010 (first published 13 August 2009)
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc
- Imprint Penguin USA
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 266
- Language English