After The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee completes his trilogy with a new masterwork, The Death of Jesus.
David has grown to be a tall ten-year-old. He is a natural at soccer, and loves kicking a ball around with his friends. His father Simón and Bolívar the dog usually watch. His mother Inés works in a fashion boutique.
David still asks lots of questions. In dancing class at the Academy of Music he dances as he chooses. He refuses to do sums and will not read any books except Don Quixote.
One day Julio Fabricante, the director of a nearby orphanage, invites David and his friends to form a proper soccer team. David decides he will leave Simón and Inés to live with Julio. Before long he succumbs to a mysterious illness.
In The Death of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee continues to explore the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions.
About the Author
John Maxwell "J. M." Coetzee is a South African novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He relocated to Australia in 2002 and lives in Adelaide.
He became an Australian citizen in 2006. In 2013, Richard Poplak of the Daily Maverick described Coetzee as "inarguably the most celebrated and decorated living English-language author".
Before receiving the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, Coetzee was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, CNA Prize (thrice), the Prix Femina Étranger, The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Booker Prize (twice), among other accolades.
Industry Reviews
'Freed from literary convention, Mr Coetzee writes not to provide answers, but to ask great questions.'
* Economist *
'Viewed as the culmination (if not necessarily the conclusion) of [Coetzee's] long literary career, these distinctive late fictions achieve a remarkable synthesis of the influences, styles, and thematic preoccupations that have animated his work for the better part of half a century.'
* ABR *
'Everything in The Death of Jesus, like its predecessor volumes, is wrapped in a mystery that works and weaves like the half-remembered music of a dream...you are self-evidently in the presence of a masterpiece...The Death of Jesus is fiction of an order that dazzles the mind.'
* Age/SMH *
'197 pages that will last forever. The book is a masterpiece, the near-perfect culmination of a trilogy that only Coetzee could write...[H]e is the world's greatest living writer.'
Stephen Romei * Australian *
'Short, simple but elegant.'
* Stephen Romei, RN Bookshelf *
'The culmination of the masterwork of a sequence characterised by the power of its vision and the poignancy of its articulation, the work of a supreme master.'
Peter Craven * Australian *
