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Summertime

Summertime

by J. M. Coetzee
Hardback
Publication Date: 13/08/2009

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A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 19721977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'.Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is 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, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.
ISBN:
9781846553189
9781846553189
Category:
Historical Fiction
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
13-08-2009
Language:
English
Publisher:
Random House
Country of origin:
United Kingdom
Dimensions (mm):
222x144x26mm
Weight:
0.4kg
J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. His most recent writing is a trilogy of novels- The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus and The Death of Jesus. He lives in Adelaide.

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