J.M. Coetzee is one of the most intriguing of authors in all of world literature. Supple, razor-sharp, compelling, erudite: the adjectives pile up, but we seem to get no closer to the elusive heart of his fiction. Now, in J.M. Coetzee and the Life of writing, David Attwell illuminates the extraordinary creative processes behind Coetzee’s novels from Dusklands to The childhood of Jesus. Using Coetzee’s manuscripts, notebooks and research papers – recently deposited at the Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin – Attwell produces a fascinating story of the creative trajectory and the life out of which the fiction was engendered. He shows convincingly that all of Coetzee’s work is autobiographical, the memoirs being continuous with the fictions, and that his writing proceeds with self-conscious and never-ending reflection. This is a moving and readable account which is bound to change the way Coetzee is read, by the critics and general reader alike.