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  • Published: 15 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099465942
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $19.99

In the Heart of the Country



An intense, unsettling, remarkable novel of a mind in decline from a writer unparralleled in fiction.

Stifled by the torpor of colonial South Africa and trapped in a web of reciprocal oppression, a lonely sheep farmer seeks comfort in the arms of a black concubine. But when his embittered spinster daughter Magda feels shamed, this lurch across the racial divide marks the end of a tenuous feudal peace.

As she dreams madly of bloody revenge, Magda's consciousness starts to drift and the line between fact and the workings of her excited imagination becomes blurred. What follows is the fable of a woman's passionate, obsessed and violent response to an Africa that will not heed her.

  • Published: 15 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099465942
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $19.99

About the author

J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg,Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He lives in Adelaide.

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