<b>If <i>The Pole and Other Stories</i> were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing... </b>Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousness, humour, and grand, existential strangeness
Guardian
In <i>The Pole</i>, Coetzee forges <b>an autofiction of contemplation,</b> in which thought and inquiry take precedence over melodrama — because time is running out
Financial Times
These stories are… touched with a moral intensity… <b>striking</b>
Literary Review
<b>JM Coetzee is a great writer, perhaps one of the greatest still around… This is Coetzee at his most lugubrious and beguiling:</b> if it turns out to be one of his last works, it can easily claim to be one of the best occasional utterings from a novelist who is as notoriously reclusive in person as he is piercingly acute in writing
Big Issue
<b><i>The Pole</i>…confirms Coetzee as one of the great writers of fiction… </b>[and] shows that, at 83 years old, there is no diminishing of his talents. Long may he darken our pages with prose
Observer
<b>This book, like all of his work, operates at a bracing, invigorating level,</b> like a dunk in ice-cold water – or, as he writes, “Like driving into an allegory!”
New Statesman, *Book of the Day*
<b>[An] elegant, elegiac collection…</b> [and] thought-provoking as ever
Mail on Sunday
<i>The Pole and Other Stories</i>, a collection of one novella and five tales, finds him [Coetzee], at 83, <b>as good as ever,</b> pursuing the ethical and artistic questions that have animated his whole career… this book feels unified, and has lateness written all over it
Daily Telegraph
<b>This book is a late-career gem by one of the world’s most original writers and shows that he is still breaking new ground </b>at the same time as revealing a funny side that may have been there all along
i
[In this] late-in-life collection by the South African master…<b> not a phrase [is] wasted, everything sharp and back-to-the-bone</b>
Financial Times, *Books of the Year*
In this beautifully written and compulsively readable story of love and the mutability of human relationships, pianist Witold's infatuation with Beatriz will change them both.
A Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and Financial Times Book of the Year
‘Confirms Coetzee as one of the great writers of fiction’ Observer
After his piano recital in Barcelona, Witold Walczykiewicz – white-haired virtuoso, controversial interpreter of Chopin – becomes infatuated with Beatriz, his designated companion at dinner. Beatriz, a stylish patron of the arts, is at first unmoved. But as the stranger’s letters, music, and poetry flood into her home, a dream of love begins that surprises them both.
‘One of the world’s most original writers… He is still breaking new ground at the same time as revealing a funny side’ i
‘His prose, apparently simple, is so perfected at every turn that it is moving to read, line after line’ Sunday Times