Where to start with J. M. Coetzee

Australian and South African novelist, born 1940. Won the Booker Prize in 1983 and 1999.

Best J. M. Coetzee book to start with: Disgrace (1999), on 6 of the 17 lists it could have made.

Disgrace is the Coetzee to begin with. It won the Booker Prize in 1999, and it is short and direct. A university lecturer in Cape Town loses his job and his standing, and the book follows what he does next. The prose is plain, and it never wastes a page.

Life and Times of Michael K, which won the Booker Prize in 1983, is the next step. It follows a gardener trying to cross a country at war, and it is quiet and unusual. Waiting for the Barbarians is the one to choose if you like a parable: an official on the edge of an unnamed empire is drawn into its cruelty.

Summertime was shortlisted for the Booker in 2009 and is fiction presented as a biographical study of the author himself, told through interviews with people who knew him. It is the most playful of the four, and it works best once you have read at least one of his other books.