The most satisfying book I’ve read recently was Scenes from Provincial Life, a revised collection of J.M. Coetzee’s fiction-memoirs Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime. A comfortingly hefty novel, Scenes from Provincial Life brings together three vital periods in the life of ‘character’ John Coetzee (as distinguished from the living, breathing, Adelaide-residing J.M. Coetzee). It tracks his evolution from reluctant mama’s boy to disaffected early computer programmer to the subject of a biographer’s series of interviews, conducted in an attempt to piece together the now-dead writer’s non-writing life. I came to it soon after finishing the most recent of Coetzee’s novels, The Childhood of Jesus. Both are concerned with how what happens to us makes us who we are, and how we put ourselves together when ‘what happened’ goes missing.

I read Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning Disgrace a few years ago and loved it—a response maybe not entirely fitting, given the gravity of the subject matter. What happens to David Lurie on his daughter’s remote South African farm is immensely real and evocative, especially given the austerity of the text—the novel is only 220 pages long, and all the more devastating for it. There’s a special little chamber of my heart reserved for authors who can make us care about the experiences of a nasty protagonist. Coetzee was given the lease after Disgrace, with other parts of the chamber sub-let by Ian McEwan (Solar), Zadie Smith (On Beauty), and Christos Tsiolkas (The Slap).