Foe

First edition. 8vo. Pp. 157, [3, blank]. Publisher's brown cloth, lettered in gilt to spine. The South African, and true first edition.

Author's fifth book. Nobel laureate and two-time Booker prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee re-imagines Daniel Defoe's classic novel Robinson Crusoe. Focused primarily on themes of language and power, and told from the perspective of an additional castaway on the island inhabited by "Cruso" and his man, Friday, Foe was the subject of criticism as politically irrelevant upon its release in his native South Africa. Coetzee revisited the composition of Robinson Crusoe in 2003 in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, entitled "He and his Man".

"A small miracle of a book...of marvellous intricacy and overwhelming power." –The Washington Post