Scenes from Provincial Life

Praise for the trilogy

BOYHOOD

This life is described with such skill, such exactitude and such relentlessness that I found myself gasping for air … Coetzee has achieved something universal in his work … a fine book, probably the best description of a childhood I have ever read.

— The Times

YOUTH

A memorable picture of the harshness London can offer to incomers … Youth is a wonderful book: a Bildungs roman, or portrait of the artist as a young man, to rank with any in the canon.

— Evening Standard

Certainly, no writer I have encountered has captured so vividly the paralysing sense of deracination that seized many of us when we found ourselves cast up on a shore that proved far more alien and hostile than our fantasies and ambitions had led us to imagine.

— The Sydney Morning Herald

SUMMERTIME

This is the third instalment of a life so reserved, so repressed, so seething with polite rage and restrained despair that it could only be approached through a third-person voice it is wonderful stuff. But then, Coetzee is wonderful: edgy, black, remorselessly human, witty, and often outright funny.’

— Irish Times

Here in Summertime, passion exceeds argument. Here for a moment she [the reviewer] answers as a reader not with her head but with her heart.

— Australian Literary Review

As the [fictional] biography unfolds, the picture that emerges is devastatingly honest, charming, at times funny, but always self-critical. The book is not too cool or too neat. It is a stunning achievement by a man at the height of his powers.

— The Courier-Mail

Summertime is an exhilarating read. Like being played with by a magnificent lion whose paws sometimes caress but at other times the muscle and the claw send you spinning. The sly joke is that this lion puts the idea into his text that he, the writer, is inconsequential. Here is a paradox: a man such as this can write words that touch readers at the deepest level.

— The Age

Summertime is both an elegant request that the sum of Coetzee’s existence as a public figure should be looked for only in his writing, and ample evidence, once again, why that request should be honoured.

— The Guardian

Rich offerings as an imaginatively distorted and distorting portrait of the artist as outsider.

— Times Literary Supplement

The writing is luminous, revealing intellectual and emotional subtlety of a very high order.

— The Sydney Morning Herald