J. M. Coetzee - Disgrace

Masterpiece!

Disgrace is a 1999 novel by South African author J. M. Coetzee. It won the Booker Prize. The writer was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years after its publication.

David Lurie is a white South African professor of English who loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his own daughter. He is twice-divorced and dissatisfied with his job as a 'communications' lecturer, teaching a class in romantic literature at a technical university in Cape Town in post-apartheidSouth Africa. Lurie's sexual activities are all inherently risky. Before the sexual affair that will ruin him, he becomes attached to a prostitute and attempts to have a romantic relationship with her (despite her having a family), which she rebuffs. He then seduces a secretary at his university, only to completely ignore her afterwards............

Lurie is working on an opera concerning Lord Byron's final phase of life in Italy which mirrors his own life in that Byron is living a life of hedonism and excess and is having an affair with a married woman.

And there's so much more in this book that will make one of your greatest literary treats.

I know it was one of mine.