Disgrace: A Novel

Front Cover
Penguin, Nov 1, 2000 - Fiction - 224 pages
The provocative Booker Prize winning novel from Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee

"Compulsively readable... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it." —The New Yorker

At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding. David's visit becomes an extended stay as he attempts to find meaning in his one remaining relationship. Instead, an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront their strained relationship and the equallity complicated racial complexities of the new South Africa. 

2024 marks the 25th Anniversary of the publication of Disgrace
 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
11
Section 3
18
Section 4
29
Section 5
36
Section 6
47
Section 7
59
Section 8
68
Section 13
113
Section 14
123
Section 15
136
Section 16
147
Section 17
151
Section 18
163
Section 19
175
Section 20
187

Section 9
80
Section 10
88
Section 11
100
Section 12
106
Section 21
196
Section 22
206
Section 23
213
Copyright

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About the author (2000)

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and 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 essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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