Boyhood

Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

A memoir of growing up in South Africa during the 1940s and 1950s, written by the Nobel Prize-winning author of THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MICHAEL K. and DISGRACE. Coetzee examines his early impressions of his family, his unhappy years at school, and his slowly developing awareness of the political strife that hangs over his country.

Editions of Boyhood

	ISBN 9780670872206	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Penguin Group USA	Date 1997	Price $14.37	Used - Good
	ISBN 9780140265668	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Penguin Group USA	Date 1998	Price $7.00	New

Publisher Notes

Coetzee grew up in a new development north of Cape Town, tormented by guilt and fear. With a father he despised, and a mother he both adored and resented, he led a double life-the brilliant and well-behaved student at school, the princely despot at home, always terrified of losing his mother's love. His first encounters with literature, the awakenings of sexual desire, and a growing awareness of apartheid left him with baffling questions; and only in his love of the high veld ("farms are places of freedom, of life") could he find a sense of belonging. Bold and telling, this masterly evocation of a young boy's life is the book Coetzee's many admirers have been waiting for, but never could have expected.

Media Reviews

"A short and unsettling, deftly realized memoir....This is not an eventful memoir--its strength comes, instead, from Coetzee's nuanced, unblinking perceptions. His childhood was not unhappy in the conventional sense; the sadness and tragedies were mainly of the ordinary kind, and in his masterful depiction of them, that's what makes them so shattering....[A] powerful, disillusioned portrait of childhood..."

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