Disgrace

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [iv], 219, [1]. Black cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine; maroon endpapers. Jacket photograph by Lucy Harmer / Photonica. First state printing by Biddles Ltd, in a first issue dust jacket sans Booker Prize legend on the front panel, and priced £14.99 to front flap.

Signed by Author to title page.

Coetzee's eighth novel. Winner of the 1999 Booker Prize, becoming in the process the first author to win it twice, following his 1983 award for Life and Times of Michael K. One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. A middle-aged Romantic poetry professor in post-apartheid South Africa retreats to his daughter's Eastern Cape farm, following his disgrace "romancing" one of his young charges. The move precipitates a savage attack on them both, unfortunate victims in the struggle of shifting power dynamics in a country in transition.

After polling 150 of the world's greatest writers, in 2006 the Observer newspaper named it the best novel written in the quarter-century, 1980 to 2005. Basis for the 2008 film directed by Steve Jacobs, starring John Malkovich and Jessica Haines. Awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. "Coetzee's definitive statement on modern South Africa. In prose as spare as a whip, Disgrace strides out with authority, a Classic for future generations." –The Observer