Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009.
The third part in the author’s trilogy of fictionalised memoir. The book stands on its own too and it is an interesting concept for the author to write about himself as he imagines others must have seen him. It’s a fascinating piece of social history too as the place and period in time is 1970’s South Africa.
Please note that we do not have an extract from this title available to download.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
| Recommendations: |
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'.
Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.
Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth .
Summertime features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, eBooks of the Month, General Fiction, Fiction, Recommendations
Summertime is available in Hardback
Summertime was written by J.M. Coetzee and published by Harvill Secker an imprint of Vintage
