And he was just a boy, this Mr Coetzee. I was a woman and he was a boy. He was a boy as a priest is always a boy until suddenly one day he is an old man.

After some time in America, the young unpublished writer John Coetzee returns to suburban Cape Town to live with his ailing father. His biographer chronicles this period in a series of interviews with the people important in Coetzee’s life, constructing a portrait of an awkward literary man at a remove from those around him. Summertime is the last of J. M. Coetzee’s masterly trio of autobiographical novels, Scenes from Provincial Life.