The Childhood of Jesus

It's a relief after reading a lot of contemporary fiction to come across the sober prose of Coetzee. He doesn't shout at you... He knows what he's doing... The whole novel is a kind of escape act, an elaborate rope trick... magical

Benjamin Markovits, Observer

Double Booker Prize-winner Coetzee's fable has a dream-like, Kafkaesque quality. Are we in some kind of heaven, purgatory or simply another staging post of existence? Clear answers are elusive, but this is a riveting, thought-provoking read and surely Coetzee's best novel since Disgrace more than a decade ago

John Harding, Daily Mail

[A] moving but mysterious story of a lost childhood... Is it possible to be deeply affected by a book without really knowing what it's about? Before reading J.M. Coetzee's new novel I might have said no - but now I'm not so sure... [As] disquieting as it is moving... [All] I can say is that ever since I finished it, it's been going round and round inside my head like nothing else I've read in ages

John Preston, Sunday Telegraph

What JM Coetzee writes matters... [A narrative mode] akin to that of Kafka... At once lucid and elusive

David Sexton, Scotland on Sunday

The Childhood of Jesus represents a return to the allegorical mode that made him famous... The Childhood of Jesus does ample justice to his giant reputation: it’s richly enigmatic, with regular flashes of Coetzee’s piercing intelligence

Theo Tait, Guardian

Written with all of Coetzee’s penetrating rigour, it will be an early contender for an unprecedented third Booker prize

Tim Adams, Observer

Tormented states of mind, ambivalence and guilt stalk his work, as do the dual influences of Kafka and Beckett

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

This is a book to make you think. This is a book to forcefully turn you away from mindless entertainment and set you on a journey inwards, where you ask yourself the important questions in life. It's philosophy as fiction... Part of his achievement is down to how fit for purpose his prose is. It is remarkably sparse and yet feels dense, weighted with layers and layers of meaning

Irish Independent

There aren’t many subjects bigger than the question of faith – and with The Childhood of Jesus, Coetzee appears to have found a subject worthy of his high-level craftsmanship

Nadine O'Regan, Sunday Business Post

This book will continue to act, silently and unexpectedly, on the reader’s imagination. It unpicks the Christian myth and braids it together with folk tales, the early novel, Pythagorean mysticism, Platonic philosophy, Buddhist epigrams, mathematics – powerful and poetic languages that underwrite our world

Hedley Twidle, Financial Times

He’s not quite the Messiah but J.M. Coeztee is a devilishly clever novelist… J.M. Coetzee fashions prose of a lapidary clarity and grace… Coetzee has returned to the (paradoxically) clear and yet opaque fable mode of master-works such as Waiting for the Barbarians. Given the title, one might expect a bleak retelling of gospel stories…but Coetzee never makes things so simple for disciples

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

A fine, haunting novel that gets under your skin and into your marrow

Jake Kerridge, Daily Express

A retelling of the gospels? A fable about Utopian, Chaves-style socialism? Coeztee moves in mysterious, but mesmerising, ways

i

There are knotty concerns here on reading, on order and chaos, on political engagement, on almost anything you can think of. But, "you think too much," Elena says to Simón. "This has nothing to do with thinking."... What Coetzee has given us is a book not of answers but of questions... Coetzee’s prose is clean and efficient, driving the reader on through the mazy stasis of life in Novilla. There is plenty of what, to avoid a cliché, we might call Kafkaish stuff... These qualities, combined with the enjoyable and unaccustomed exercise of thinking about the book – wanting to think about it – all the way through, meant that in a strange sense, The Childhood of Jesus is the most fun I’ve had with a novel in ages

The Asylum

Reading JM Coetzee is like swimming in a sea with a calm surface and a savage undertow. His sentences are lean; his subjects menacing: power, race, animal rights and confession

Intelligent Life

An intellectual adventure

Shanice McBean, Socialist Review

A perversely comic, intellectually profound and obscurely allegorical novel

Vivek Santayana, Edinburgh Journal

As well as an intriguing literary and metaphysical puzzle, the book is also one of profound and painful humanity, preoccupied with some of the most essential questions about what it means to be a parent and what happens when noble principles are confronted with the grubby details of everyday life

Patrick Flanery, Washington Post

As well as an intriguing literary and metaphysical puzzle, the book is also one of profound and painful humanity, preoccupied with some of the most essential questions about what it means to be a parent and what happens when noble principles are confronted with the grubby details of everyday life

Patrick Flanery, Washington Post