Disgrace is the Booker Prize winner scarcely designed for top honours: it's contemporary (present day South Africa), short (only just over 200 pages), and intensely readable.

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie's impulsive affair with a young student ends badly. The middle-aged, twice divorced lecturer, tired of the bullshit, readily admits his guilt but refuses to submit to the demanded media flogging. He resigns and retreats to the country hamlet of Grahamstown and his lesbian daughter Lucy, all the better to nurse his "disgrace".

But South Africa is a country riven with violence and shifting allegiances and very soon the comfort he takes in simplicity is shattered when the farm is attacked by a gang who burn him, rape her and butcher their dogs. Lucy's refusal to even admit the incident, David decides, becomes her own "disgrace".

Coetzee's prose is spare and lyrical, confident enough in its erudition not to grandstand. And if that makes it reminiscent of fellow Booker nominee, the late Brain Moore, then all the better. The opening chapters, the university chapters, mind, recall David Mamet, and not only for their echoes of Oleanna-ish sexual allegations, but in the way Coetzee seems able to transpose Mamet's ear for dialogue to the page. ("It is not a defence. You want a confession, I give you a confession. As for the impulse, it was far from ungovernable.") Elsewhere Coetzee offers a disturbingly unresolved portrait of modern white South Africa in general, and a valuable addition to the (less than extensive) literature of exhaustion in particular.