Disgrace

Summary

David Lurie, a Cape Town academic disgraced by an affair with a student, retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding in the Eastern Cape, where a violent incident forces both to reckon with a transformed country. Coetzee's spare, unflinching prose probes shame, power, and the limits of liberal conscience in postapartheid South Africa. The novel's moral austerity and refusal of easy redemption made it one of the defining works of its decade.