The Childhood of Jesus

`Coetzee is a master we scarcely deserve.' * Age * 'Poignant and compassionate...A tale that is by turns irritating and deeply satisfying, philosophically soaring yet earthy, maddeningly vague and mercilessly precise.' 4.5 stars * Good Reading * 'A breathtaking performance, full of the tears in things and the wonders of which we cannot speak.' -- Peter Craven * Sydney Review of Books * 'The sense of calm, furthered by Coetzee's spare prose, is very unsettling...These are not the horrors of Waiting for the Barbarians, this is the horror of banality.' * Independent on Sunday * '[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 JM 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.' * Sunday Telegraph * 'The Childhood of Jesus represents a return to the allegorical mode that made him famous...a Kafkaesque version of the nativity story...The Childhood of Jesus does ample justice to his giant reputation: it's richly enigmatic, with regular flashes of Coetzee's piercing intelligence.' * Guardian * 'Written with all of Coetzee's penetrating rigour, it will be an early contender for an unprecedented third Booker prize.' * 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.' * Daily Mail * '[A] quiet, haunting novel...Coetzee's calm, emblematic prose lifts the plot into something redolent with metaphor and mystery...Any statement can become a symbol; every event is suffused with potential revelation; something magical is always present and just out of reach...It's a memorable accomplishment, turning the everyday into the almost everlasting.' * Weekend Herald (NZ) * 'Beautiful but enigmatic fable, written in clean, fierce, present tense prose, seems set in some sort of afterlife...insistently memorable in its spare evocations, it leaves the reader charmed, intrigued, impressed and curious, with much compulsively to ponder.' * Adelaide Advertiser * 'Coetzee's characters play with conflicting ideas in a way that is at once disarmingly simple and maddeningly convoluted. The result is a delightful, stimulating puzzle. The Childhood of Jesus is a beautiful yet complex work that will reward the reader handsomely.' -- Mark Rubbo, Readings 'A theological and philosophical fable of considerable brilliance, power and wit. Coetzee hasn't done anything as fine and beautifully executed as this since Disgrace.' * Canberra Times / Age * '...Coetzee gradually, with great intelligence and skill, brings to extraordinary - possibly divine - life an ostensibly simple story.' * Weekend Australian *