«Described with such skill, such exactitude and such relentlessness that I found myself gasping for air... Coetzee has achieved something universal in his work... A fine book, probably the best description of a childhood I have ever read»

The Times (on Boyhood)

«A memorable picture of the harshness London can offer to incomers... Youth is a wonderful book: a portrait of the artist as a young man, to rank with any in the canon»

Evening Standard (on Youth)

«This is the third instalment of a life so reserved, so repressed, so seething with polite rage and restrained despair that it could only be approached through a third-person voice...it is wonderful stuff»

Irish Times (on Summertime)

«The publication of Coetzee's trilogy of fictionalised memoir - Boyhood, Youth and Summertime - in one handsome volume highlights the uneasy relationship between the reality of his life and the fiction of his books»

Alex Preston, New Statesman