Shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize

A brilliant new work of fiction from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year

A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father-a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him. These accounts add up to an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it hard to make meaningful connections with the people around him.

Summertime is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. Incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny, Summertime is a compelling work by one of today's most esteemed writers.

J. M. 庫切 (1940－　)

2003年諾貝爾文學奬獲得者，著名作傢和學者。生於南非開普敦，先後在南非和美國接受教育。庫切學識淵博，在文學、哲學、社會學、倫理學和宗教方麵造詣頗深，是一位學者型作傢。幾乎囊括所有文學大奬，兩次獲得布剋奬，是英語文學中獲奬最多的作傢。1980年小說《等待野蠻人》一齣版，即為庫切贏得瞭國際聲譽，英國企鵝齣版社將此書列入“20世紀經典”係列。庫切是一個有道德原則的懷疑論者，從根子上抓住瞭文明的痼疾。