The narrator, a student in 1950s South Africa, plots an escape from his native country, from the stifling love of his mother, from a father whose failures haunt him - and from what he is sure is impending revolution. However, arriving at last in London, he begins the dark pilgrimage.

Youth's narrator, a student in 1950s South Africa, has long been plotting an escape from his native country. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world, he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art. Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead, he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmers, from which random, loveless affaires offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing and begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting.

Twice winner of the Booker Prize, J M Coetzee, chronicler of fragile, disrupted individuals and societies, here turns his gaze on a young man whose search for the supposed joys and fulfilments of youth leaves him constantly empty-handed. It is the 1960s, and John is a confused student in his native South Africa. Desperately ashamed of both his country and his family, he longs to escape to one of the poetic European cities he reads about. He manages to reach London, but the city is grey and miserable and his job as a computer programmer for IBM hard and unromantic. Lonely and culturally dislocated, he finds himself unable to write the poetry he hoped to, and his relationships and sexual encounters seem empty compared to the intellectual and hedonistic joys he longs for. This is an astonishingly accomplished deptiction of a youth whose dreams bear no relation to reality and who is struggling to come to terms with himself during a time of great change for the world, both politically and technologically. Cut off from the true companionship of others, his only mental sustenance comes from literature and cinema, which he thinks about obsessively as his mind turns in on itself. Through the consciousness of a man terrified of failure and yet doomed to it we see a bleak landscape of misery and alienation. A masterpiece. (Kirkus UK)