The Pole and Other Stories

In The Pole, Coetzee forges an autofiction of contemplation, in which thought and inquiry take precedence over melodrama — because time is running out

Financial Times

These stories are… touched with a moral intensity… striking

Literary Review

JM Coetzee is a great writer, perhaps one of the greatest still around… This is Coetzee at his most lugubrious and beguiling: if it turns out to be one of his last works, it can easily claim to be one of the best occasional utterings from a novelist who is as notoriously reclusive in person as he is piercingly acute in writing

Big Issue

The Pole…confirms Coetzee as one of the great writers of fiction… [and] shows that, at 83 years old, there is no diminishing of his talents. Long may he darken our pages with prose

Observer

This book, like all of his work, operates at a bracing, invigorating level, like a dunk in ice-cold water – or, as he writes, “Like driving into an allegory!”

New Statesman, *Book of the Day*

[An] elegant, elegiac collection… [and] thought-provoking as ever

Mail on Sunday

The Pole and Other Stories, a collection of one novella and five tales, finds him [Coetzee], at 83, as good as ever, pursuing the ethical and artistic questions that have animated his whole career… this book feels unified, and has lateness written all over it

Daily Telegraph

This book is a late-career gem by one of the world’s most original writers and shows that he is still breaking new ground at the same time as revealing a funny side that may have been there all along

i

[In this] late-in-life collection by the South African master… not a phrase [is] wasted, everything sharp and back-to-the-bone

Financial Times, *Books of the Year*