You must listen. I speak with the voice of things to come. I speak in troubled times and tell you how to be as children again.

J. M. Coetzee’s debut novel is actually two stunning novellas: ‘Vietnam Project’, about a researcher investigating US propaganda and psychological warfare in Vietnam; and ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’, the story of an eighteenth-century Boer frontiersman and his quest for revenge on a local tribe. Both are concerned with power—who wields it, who is subject to it—and its often catastrophic consequences.