Disgrace

The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.

J. M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace, set in post-apartheid South Africa, takes us into the disquieting mind of twice-divorced university teacher David Lurie as he loses his job and his honour after engaging in an ill-advised affair with a susceptible student.

When he retreats to his daughter's farm, a brutal attack highlights their fractured relationship. Is it only through intense suffering and shame-his own as well as that of others-that David can begin to change, to understand his country and what it means to be human?

In Disgrace, this Nobel-Prize winning writer examines ideas of evil, violence, dignity and redemption in a country dominated by the power dynamics of race.