Disgrace is the eighth stand-alone novel by award-winning author, J.M.Coetzee. After a short-lived, impulsive affair with a student, Romance poetry teacher, David Lurie resigns his position at Cape Town Technical University and retreats to his daughters farm in the South African countryside. They live in relative harmony until an attack leaves them feeling violated and fearful. Lurie retrns to Cape Town to work on an opera he is composing about the poet Byron and his lover Teresa. As Coetzee narrates the recent events of Luries life if the face of the changing political landscape of South Africa, he examines a range of topics: ageing, lesbianism, a males contribution in sex, violence and violation, rape, humiliation, the price to be paid to be permitted to remain peacefully in a land reclaimed by its owners, freedom of speech, freedom to remain silent, power relations and sexual relations. Luries refusal to pay lip service to conventions demands highlights the inflexible and occasionally ridiculous nature of the system. His daughter tells him, .surely you know by now that the trials are not about principles, they are about how well you put yourself across. While there is some excellent prose: The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. and The language he draws on with such aplomb is, if he only knew it, tired, friable, eaten from inside as if by termites. Only monosyllables can still be relied on, and not even all of them., the writing style is not particularly pleasing and the characters are unappealing and often irritating. I read this book after having read The Childhood of Jesus, which has been predicted to win Coetzee another Booker, to see if I liked it any better than that one. A Man Booker prize winner this one may be, but it confirms for me that I need read no more Coetzee.