Foe - J.M. Coetzee (First edition)

When Susan Barton is marooned on an island in the middle of the Atlantic she enters the world of two men. One is a silent servant called Friday; the other is Robinson Cruso.

The island is a society already at work. Its rules are strict and simple: survival, industry and order. Cruso is master and Friday is slave. Susan watches the creation of a barren world – an architecture of stone terraces above bleak and empty beaches – and waits to be rescued.

Back in London, with Friday in tow as evidence of her strange adventure, she approaches the author Daniel Foe. But Foe is less interested in the history of the island than in the story of Susan herself, and battle lines are drawn between writer and subject.

Sole witness to this contest, as he was to the mystery of Cruso’s island, is the silent Friday.

J. M. Coetzee’s novel is a work of austere, exquisite brilliance. Fable, allegory and literary palimpsest, it illuminates and interprets the poles to which our lives are pushed. But between these poles – of speech and silence, sanity and madness, truth and falsehood – lie the tensions that Coetzee makes rich and luminous: art, dream and towering imagination.