Revisiting the South Africa of half a century ago, J.M Coetzee writes about his childhood and interior life. BOYHOOD'S young narrator grew up in a small country town. With a father he imitated but could not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he picked his way through a world that refused to explain its rules, but whose rules he knew he must obey. Steering between these contradictions, BOYHOOD evokes the tensions, delights and terrors of childhood with startling, haunting immediacy.

Coetzee is a professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town. He has won many literary awards, including the CNA prize, South Africa's premier literary award (three times), the Booker Prize (twice), the Prix -tranger Femina, the Jerusalem Prize, the Lannan Literary Award and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.