Summer

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer John Coetzee. His project focuses on the years between 1972 and 1977, when Coetzee, then in his thirties, shared a dilapidated country house on the outskirts of Cape Town with his widowed father. This was, as the biographer deduces, the period during which he was "finding his feet as a writer".

Never having met Coetzee in person, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him: a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin, Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, and old friends and colleagues. From their testimonies emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual, with little talent for opening up to others. 

Within the family, he is seen as an outsider, someone who tried to escape the tribe and has now returned, more reserved. In South Africa at the time, his insistence on doing manual labour, his long hair and beard, and the rumours that he writes poetry arouse nothing but suspicion.

At times moving, at others frankly amusing, Summer shows us a great writer in full preparation for his work. Summer completes the trilogy of fictionalised memoirs that began with Boyhood and Youth.