J.M. COETZEE (b.1940)
Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg, 1999.
‘This is not a sign of life, simply an autonomous electrical discharge’: inscribed first edition of the Booker Prize-winning novel. Disgrace inhabits the world of David Lurie, a middle-aged Cape Town academic in post-Apartheid South Africa, whose life turns towards ignominy following a sexual assault on a student. Echoing the latter part of the novel in which Lurie assists with the disposal of stray dogs, Coetzee’s inscription reads: ‘Euthanasia (putting down) a dog. Abbreviated (rough) procedure, without preliminary sedation, using a barbiturate. Inject intravenously; produces cardiac arrest within 15-60 seconds. Animal may move after death. This is not a sign of life, simply an autonomous electrical discharge.’ A superb example of the Nobel laureate’s finest novel.

Octavo. Original black cloth, gilt lettering to spine, pictorial dust jacket.

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