Description

In this beautifully written and compulsively readable story of love and the mutability of human relationships, pianist Witold’s infatuation with Beatriz will change them both.

A Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and Financial Times Book of the Year

‘Confirms Coetzee as one of the great writers of fiction’ Observer

After his piano recital in Barcelona, Witold Walczykiewicz – white-haired virtuoso, controversial interpreter of Chopin – becomes infatuated with Beatriz, his designated companion at dinner. Beatriz, a stylish patron of the arts, is at first unmoved. But as the stranger’s letters, music, and poetry flood into her home, a dream of love begins that surprises them both.

‘One of the world’s most original writers… He is still breaking new ground at the same time as revealing a funny side’ i

‘His prose, apparently simple, is so perfected at every turn that it is moving to read, line after line’ Sunday Times

Publisher Review

If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee’s] final work, it would be astonishing… Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousness, humour, and grand, existential strangeness * Guardian * In The Pole, Coetzee forges an autofiction of contemplation, in which thought and inquiry take precedence over melodrama – because time is running out * Financial Times * These stories are… touched with a moral intensity… striking * Literary Review * JM Coetzee is a great writer, perhaps one of the greatest still around… This is Coetzee at his most lugubrious and beguiling: if it turns out to be one of his last works, it can easily claim to be one of the best occasional utterings from a novelist who is as notoriously reclusive in person as he is piercingly acute in writing * Big Issue * The Pole…confirms Coetzee as one of the great writers of fiction… [and] shows that, at 83 years old, there is no diminishing of his talents. Long may he darken our pages with prose * Observer * This book, like all of his work, operates at a bracing, invigorating level, like a dunk in ice-cold water – or, as he writes, “Like driving into an allegory!” * New Statesman, *Book of the Day* * [An] elegant, elegiac collection… [and] thought-provoking as ever * Mail on Sunday * The Pole and Other Stories, a collection of one novella and five tales, finds him [Coetzee], at 83, as good as ever, pursuing the ethical and artistic questions that have animated his whole career… this book feels unified, and has lateness written all over it * Daily Telegraph * This book is a late-career gem by one of the world’s most original writers and shows that he is still breaking new ground at the same time as revealing a funny side that may have been there all along * i * [In this] late-in-life collection by the South African master… not a phrase [is] wasted, everything sharp and back-to-the-bone * Financial Times, *Books of the Year* * Perhaps the greatest novelist alive… Coetzee’s prose, apparently simple, is so perfected at every turn that it is moving to read, line after line * Sunday Times, *Books of the Year* * The Pole is one of the best books of the year by any author of any age, exhibiting not the slightest diminution in his powers… here is not a sentence that is difficult to understand, and yet the book provokes thought and wonder on every page * Critic, *Books of the Year* *