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 post-apartheid South Africa. The novel's moral austerity and refusal of easy redemption made it one of the defining works of its decade.