The Pole and Other Stories

If The Pole and Other Stories were his [Coetzee's] final work, it would be astonishing... Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousness, humour, and grand, existential strangeness * Guardian *
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* *
Perhaps the greatest novelist alive… Coetzee’s prose, apparently simple, is so perfected at every turn that it is moving to read, line after line * Sunday Times, *Books of the Year* *
The Pole is one of the best books of the year by any author of any age, exhibiting not the slightest diminution in his powers… here is not a sentence that is difficult to understand, and yet the book provokes thought and wonder on every page * Critic, *Books of the Year* *