In the Heart of the Country
  • Published: 15 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099465942
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $28.99

In the Heart of the Country

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An intense, unsettling, remarkable novel of a mind in decline from a writer unparralleled in fiction.

Stifled by the torpor of colonial South Africa and trapped in a web of reciprocal oppression, a lonely sheep farmer seeks comfort in the arms of a black concubine. But when his embittered spinster daughter Magda feels shamed, this lurch across the racial divide marks the end of a tenuous feudal peace.

As she dreams madly of bloody revenge, Magda's consciousness starts to drift and the line between fact and the workings of her excited imagination becomes blurred. What follows is the fable of a woman's passionate, obsessed and violent response to an Africa that will not heed her.
  • Published: 15 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099465942
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $28.99
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About the author

J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg,Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He lives in Adelaide.

Also by J. M. Coetzee

Disgrace
The Good Story
Here and Now
The Childhood of Jesus
Waiting for the Barbarians
Stranger Shores
Life And Times Of Michael K
See all

Praise for In the Heart of the Country

A powerful study of lust, degradation and fantasy

Observer

It says something about the loneliness, about the craving for love, about the relation between master and slave and between white and black, and about man's earthly anguish and longing for salvation - in a way you do not easily escape from once it has gripped you

Andre Brink

The writing and mood are a remarkable piece of sustained intensity... One false word could have ruined this short tour de force completely. It never does

Daily Telegraph

An intellectual lyric which sings the absence of history, the electric lull before history breaks... As a piece of cultural psychoanalysis and diagnosis, it's glitteringly precise

Tom Paulin