Youth
By (Author) J. M. Coetzee
Introduction by Michael McGirr
Text Publishing
The Text Publishing Company
3rd November 2020
Australia
General
Fiction
Biographical fiction / autobiographical fiction
Short-listed for Best Designed Series, Australian Book Design Awards 2020 (Australia)
Paperback
192
Width 130mm, Height 196mm, Spine 16mm
172g
He has escaped South Africa. Everything is going well, he has attained his first goal, he ought to be happy. In fact, as the weeks pass, he finds himself more and more miserable.
In this unforgiving portrait of the artist as a young man, John flees his apartheid-riven homeland for the bleak London of the early 1960s, where he aspires to become a writer. There he becomes trapped in stultifying computer-programming work and brief, unsatisfying affairs, turning ever inwards in the struggle to realise his ambitions. Youth is the second of J. M. Coetzees masterly trio of autobiographical novels, Scenes from Provincial Life.
Beneath the tranquil flow of the prose is a biting current of ironyThis is a funny as well as doomy story. * Guardian *
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.