Youth_Coetzee
2004 Longlist

Youth

artwork-image

ABOUT
THE BOOK

The narrator of Youth, a student in the South Africa of the 1950s, has long been plotting an escape from his native country: from the stifling love of his mother, from a father whose failures haunt him, and from what he is sure is impending revolution. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world, wherever that may be, he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art.
Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing. An awkward colonial, a constitutional outsider, he begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting.
Set against the background of the 1960s – Sharpeville, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam – Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness, isolated and adrift, turning in on itself.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR J.M.
Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee’s work includes Waiting For the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

J.M. Coetzee’s work includes Waiting For the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Country
Australia, South Africa
Original Language
English
Author
Publisher
Secker & Warburg

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