YOUTH

169 pp., paperback, London, (2002) 2003. 

J.M.Coetzee's account of his life as a young man in Cape Town and London in the 1960s.

"Only a writer as great as J. M. Coetzee is capable of infusing meditation on the spoilt hope of youth with such clarity, fluency and poise ... The quality of the writing and its unflinching truthfulness make it exhilarating" Daily Mail

"What is it about himself that J. M. Coetzee feels compelled to confront? His new novel, Youth, purports to be a work of fiction. It certainly has the compulsion and internal logic of fiction - he creates a believable world and allows autonomous creations to move freely in it. In fact, Youth is less a work of imagination than a stylised memoir, in which Coetzee revisits the humiliation and struggle of his early years as a restless student in London ... Youth has none of the urgency and contemporary relevance of Disgrace, in which every sentence carried an authentic charge of intrigue. It's a book of great sorrow and regret. Coetzee is very hard on himself in creating a character - if indeed it is himself - so wretched and dislikeable. Perhaps that's his point: that he had to remind himself how much he once suffered in order to remake himself, to become the person he wanted to be, the writer he is, free from the taint of family and of the past." Jason Cowley, Guardian

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