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.

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States as a computer scientist and linguist. His first work of fiction was Dusklands. This was followed by In the Heart of the Country, which won the premier South African literary award, the CNA Prize; Waiting for the Barbarians, which was awarded the CNA Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Life and Times of Michael K, which won the Booker Prize and the Prix Etranger Femina; Foe; Age of Iron; The Master of Petersburg, which won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize; Disgrace, which won the Booker Prize; and Elizabeth Costello. J. M. Coetzee won the Jerusalem Prize in 1987 and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1998. His other works include translations; linguistic studies; literary criticism, including Stranger Shores; and two volumes of memoir: Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II. In 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.