David Lurie is a disgraced professor who has no language for the new world he finds himself in. Coetzee's prose is stripped to bone. The novel refuses answers about post-apartheid South Africa; it argues that there is no redemption, only something lived through. Won the Booker in 1999. Coetzee took the Nobel four years later.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.