About the Author

J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace, Summertime, The Childhood of Jesus and, most recently, The Schooldays of Jesus. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.

Reviews

If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing... Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousness, humour, and grand, existential strangeness
*Guardian*

These stories are… touched with a moral intensity… striking
*Literary Review*

The Pole…confirms Coetzee as one of the great writers of fiction… [and] shows that, at 83 years old, there is no diminishing of his talents. Long may he darken our pages with prose
*Observer*

This book, like all of his work, operates at a bracing, invigorating level, like a dunk in ice-cold water – or, as he writes, “Like driving into an allegory!”
*New Statesman, *Book of the Day**

[An] elegant, elegiac collection… [and] thought-provoking as ever
*Mail on Sunday*