I want to live here, he thought: I want to live here forever, where my mother and my grandmother lived. It is as simple as that. What a pity that to live in times like these a man must be ready to live like a beast.

Michael K is returning his elderly mother to her rural birthplace when she dies, leaving him to the mercy of roving armies in a South Africa gripped by war. Locked up, he escapes, determined to live life on his own terms. This compassionate and profound novel, winner of the 1983 Booker Prize, speaks to the human quest for connection—for a home—and of the ways life defies narrative.