I want to live here, he thought: I want to live here forever, where my mother and my grandmother lived. It is as simple as that. What a pity that to live in times like these a man must be ready to live like a beast.

Michael K is returning his elderly mother to her rural birthplace when she dies, leaving him to the mercy of roving armies in a South Africa gripped by war. Locked up, he escapes, determined to live life on his own terms. This compassionate and profound novel, winner of the 1983 Booker Prize, speaks to the human quest for connection—for a home—and of the ways life defies narrative.

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

‘A major work of crystalline intensity.’ Los Angeles Times

‘So purifying to the senses that one comes away feeling that one’s eye has been sharpened, one’s hearing vivified.’ New York Times Book Review

‘An outstanding achievement.’ Nadine Gordimer