<b>JM Coetzee is a great writer, perhaps one of the greatest still around… This is Coetzee at his most lugubrious and beguiling:</b> 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

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

Observer

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

New Statesman, *Book of the Day*

<b>[An] elegant, elegiac collection…</b> [and] thought-provoking as ever

Mail on Sunday

<i>The Pole and Other Stories</i>, a collection of one novella and five tales, finds him [Coetzee], at 83, <b>as good as ever,</b> 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

<b>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 </b>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…<b> not a phrase [is] wasted, everything sharp and back-to-the-bone</b>

Financial Times, *Books of the Year*