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084Novel· 1999· South Africa

Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee

A disgraced professor, his daughter's farm, and a violence that reorders everything.

After a professor is disgraced for an affair with a student, he retreats to his daughter's Eastern Cape smallholding, where a violent attack forces both to confront the shifting power of post-apartheid South Africa. Spare and unsettling, it refuses consolation about reconciliation, land and guilt. Coetzee's second Booker winner, it became the most discussed and contested novel of the country's transition.

Its legacy. It preceded Coetzee's 2003 Nobel Prize.

Author
J.M. Coetzee
First published
1999
Genre
Novel
Theme
East, Southern and North African Literature