Author:J M Coetzee

Stifled by the torpor of colonial South Africa and trapped in a web of reciprocal oppression, a lonely sheep farmer seeks comfort in the arms of a black concubine. But when his embittered spinster daughter Magda feels shamed, this lurch across the racial divide marks the end of a tenuous feudal peace.
As she dreams madly of bloody revenge, Magda's consciousness starts to drift and the line between fact and the workings of her excited imagination becomes blurred. What follows is the fable of a woman's passionate, obsessed and violent response to an Africa that will not heed her.
A powerful study of lust, degradation and fantasy
—— ObserverIt says something about the loneliness, about the craving for love, about the relation between master and slave and between white and black, and about man's earthly anguish and longing for salvation - in a way you do not easily escape from once it has gripped you
—— Andre BrinkThe writing and mood are a remarkable piece of sustained intensity... One false word could have ruined this short tour de force completely. It never does
—— Daily TelegraphAn intellectual lyric which sings the absence of history, the electric lull before history breaks... As a piece of cultural psychoanalysis and diagnosis, it's glitteringly precise
—— Tom PaulinOne of Spain's most inventive and enjoyable novelists
—— Irish ExaminerThe most important living Spanish author
—— Time Out New YorkA strikingly original book
—— Cork Evening EchoEntrancing
—— Christopher Hirst , IndependentAn ironic anti-novel about the novel: it poses serious questions about the form’s limitations in being able to capture the protean reality of memory and identity but also argues for its continuing relevance (taking its cue from writers like Barthes, Perec and Queneau who appear in its pages) as a post-modernist game of ideas, a thought-provoking jeu d’esprit.
—— Oliver Dixon , NudgeI just loved it. Lethally funny and so clever.
—— Jilly CooperI ADORED it. It's the most fun I've had with a book in a long time, and I love how she writes - so many dazzling sentences and phrases.
—— Marian KeyesSparkling savage and remarkably sexy.
—— Daisy GoodwinA wickedly funny, biting satire of Notting Hill's basement-digging class. My absolute guiltiest read this summer.
—— Plum SykesThe Jane Austen of W11
—— Scotsman on Winter GamesAn addictively funny read about the lives of the rich and richer. Four stars
—— Heat on Notting HellSmart, pacy, and hysterically funny
—— Deirdre O’Brien , Sunday MirrorThis provocative debut explores whether monogamy is all it’s cracked up to be
—— GlamourWitty, sparkling and a dissection of monogamy and happiness... Entertaining
—— LadyHere is a heroine who scores a solid ten on the sass-o-meter, and she made the whole reading experience a hoot… Guilt-free fun with this deliciously rampant romp.
—— Sarah Hughes , Heat