There’s an addictive charm…that gives a potency to this ambitious tale.

Daring, moving, imaginative and, above all, funny, this is a great debut from a promising novelist.

[A] beautifully written debut.

An exuberant, stealthily shocking debut … razor sharp.

From the start of his journey to the amazing ending of his saga we follow with awe and trepidation his moral life as all around him (almost) everyone else shows the human condition at its worst. If there is any literary justice this should sell by the bucket load. Hope it does and we hear again from this terrific first time novelist!

Jude Cook, the man behind the Byron, makes a serious impression with this exuberant, excessive, sharply-written debut.

Charming debut novel about a poet on the run from his wife, his life and another terrible - yet ordinary - predicament.

[An] interesting read. The style is impressively both realistic and intelligent.

Entertaining and rewarding

[There are] passages of real beauty and humour.

A debut that stays on the tracks

Superb collection of essays… Clever but satisfying, too

A funny and clever selection of essays

Impassioned and detailed studies offset with bagatelles

Witty, astute and irreverent

Reading JM Coetzee is like swimming in a sea with a calm surface and a savage undertow. His sentences are lean; his subjects menacing: power, race, animal rights and confession

Tormented states of mind, ambivalence and guilt stalk his work, as do the dual influences of Kafka and Beckett

A retelling of the gospels? A fable about Utopian, Chaves-style socialism? Coeztee moves in mysterious, but mesmerising, ways

There are knotty concerns here on reading, on order and chaos, on political engagement, on almost anything you can think of. But, “you think too much,” Elena says to Simón. “This has nothing to do with thinking.”... What Coetzee has given us is a book not of answers but of questions... Coetzee’s prose is clean and efficient, driving the reader on through the mazy stasis of life in Novilla. There is plenty of what, to avoid a cliché, we might call Kafkaish stuff... These qualities, combined with the enjoyable and unaccustomed exercise of thinking about the book – wanting to think about it – all the way through, meant that in a strange sense, The Childhood of Jesus is the most fun I’ve had with a novel in ages

There aren’t many subjects bigger than the question of faith – and with The Childhood of Jesus, Coetzee appears to have found a subject worthy of his high-level craftsmanship

An intellectual adventure

A perversely comic, intellectually profound and obscurely allegorical novel

With elegant ease, Jones spins a good old-fashioned comedy of manners