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Disgrace

A BBC Radio 4 Good Read

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Disgrace

Written by: J.M. Coetzee
Narrated by: Jack Klaff
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About this listen

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours, he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding.

For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.

By the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and twice winner of the Booker Prize.

 Genre Fiction Historical Literary Fiction Political World Literature

Critic Reviews

What is remarkable about Coetzee’s vision as a novelist is that it remains intensely human, rooted in common experience and replete with failure, doubt and frustration
A masterpiece
Exhilarating... One of the best novelists alive
Coetzee captures with appalling skill the white dilemma in South Africa (Justin Cartwright)
Disgrace explores the furthest reaches of what it means to be human; it is at the frontier of world literature (Geoff Dyer)
A great novel by one of the finest authors writing in the English language today (Russel Celyn Jones)
Disgrace is a defining novel of our time, its apparently simple lyricism belying a grave incomprehension that threatens to sever our world in two. There is an answer, but it is very hard and painful to come to
A searing book, and though it is often called spare, it is delightfully intricate, containing a tissue of literary allusions that are brilliantly used (John Mullan, professor of English and Booker of Bookers Judge)
Told with searing emotional and intellectual honesty, this beautifully written novel is as much a meditation on parenthood, old age and the pursuit of love and beauty as it is a snapshot of a country in turmoil
Such dilemmas are so obviously at the heart of South African politics that the allegorical parallels are inescapable...the issues raised, such as the demands of justice versus the need for reconciliation, are timeless
All stars
Most relevant
The book now has become one of classics in human life with unimaginable endeavours and failures.

Artfully Crafted To The Core

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gets under your skin and systematically dissolves all the false narratives you have optimiscally created to protect yourself from dark, uncomfortable truths.

A poignant story

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