Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize
David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simon and Ines take care of him in their new country. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog Bolivar to watch over him. But he'll be seven soon. He should be at school. And so David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance in Estrella. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. But it's here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what grown-ups are capable of.
The Schooldays of Jesus, the startling sequel to J. M. Coetzee's widely praised The Childhood of Jesus, will beguile its readers. With the mysterious simplicity of a fable, it tells a story that raises the most direct questions about life itself.
J. M. Coetzee is 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, Diary of a Bad Year, The Childhood of Jesus and Three Stories. He lives in Adelaide.
'An intimacy born from urgency crackles through each of [Coetzee's] books, as if one is not reading a text but being plugged into a brand new form of current—reinvented each time to carry a new and urgent form of narrative information...Coetzee is the most radical shapeshifter alive.' John Freeman, Australian
'Coetzee's depiction is unlike any other you've read. Rather, it's decidedly "Coetzeean"...Eloquent and provocative.' Readings
'The Schooldays of Jesus is a high-stakes meditation of the education of a strange boy. It's also extremely funny.' Australian
'These are novels for our time...They will puzzle you and frustrate you but at the end of Schooldays you will catch a glimpse of the things unseen.' Online Opinion
'The continuation of a masterpiece that is breathtaking and enthralling in its strangeness.' Peter Craven, Best Books of 2016, Australian Book Review
'Kafka-esque, full of strange bureaucracy and even stranger mysticism....It's odd to say The Schooldays of Jesus argues that parenthood is much like a Kafka story. But, like Kafka's work, the novel illustrates the struggle of logic against the ineffable. In this case, what cannot be described is the internal life of the little creatures raised into adults.' Shelf Awareness
