Compelling, often very funny, full of sudden depths

Brilliant...tenaciously absorbing

It is written with the coolness and limpidity that makes Coetzee a master... There were moments where I found it almost too affecting to read

It’s compulsively enigmatic but surprisingly funny too.

Coetzee doesn't want to be understood, or explained. He wants, merely, to be read. The Schooldays of Jesus is, indeed, very readable

The book’s interest comes almost entirely from its strangeness – its world continues to be charmingly, earnestly weird.

He is a proven master with an increasingly wilful streak, always a writer to excite, while for a reader with a fondness for backing a good horse, here it is. While it is always dangerous to push an as yet unpublished work, but in the case of Coetzee, this could be a book of the year, never mind an expected contender.

[It is] surprisingly involving...richly suggestive.

Freed from literary convention, Mr Coetzee writes not to provide answers, but to ask great questions.

[A] tenaciously absorbing sequel.

It’s a subtly different project from the strenuous fictions that won Coetzee his Nobel and two Man Booker prizes: still intense but, by his standards, a bit rambling yet oddly focused. Perhaps what we’re seeing is Coetzee having fun. There are certainly times in the novel...when I pictured the ghost of a smile behind the page.

[A] captivating tale.

It will keep you philosophically and morally on the edge of your seat throughout.

[It] is pleasingly baffling, suggesting hidden depths and multiple layers without ever quite revealing them.

What stands out, and stays with you, is the fable-like aura which makes this feel like a children’s book for adults.

Coetzee doesn’t want to be understood, or explained. He wants, merely, to be read. The Schooldays of Jesus is, indeed, very readable.

The prose is limpid, the plot simple, the style hypnotic, but what it all means I wouldn’t like to say.