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A cry for reparations for Lucy Lurie. She is the victim of an act of terrible sexual violence that devastates her life. Afterwards, she becomes obsessed with the author John Coetzee, the man who wrote the scene of violence in which she was attacked.
Withdrawn and fearful of crowds, Lucy nonetheless makes occasional forays into the world of men in her search for Coetzee himself. She means to confront him. The Lucy in his novel, Disgrace, is passive and almost entirely lacking agency. Lucy means to right the record, for she is the lacuna that Coetzee left in his novel—the missing piece of the puzzle. Lucy plans to put herself back in the story, to assert her agency and identity. For Lucy Lurie will be no man's lacuna.
This riveting, feminist reply to the book considered to be Coetzee's masterwork is also a moving story of one woman trying to put her life back together after trauma.
Winner of the Sala Novel Award
Winner of the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for the Novel
"Lucy Lurie, the character at the heart of J.M. Coetzee's acclaimed novel Disgrace, is reimagined as a real person...a surprising, subtle, and deeply challenging book...that questions the right of an author to appropriate stories as it defends the right of the character to live them." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"South African writer Snyckers makes her adult literary debut with an engaging postmodern work...Readers will find much to chew on in the questions Snyckers poses about storytelling, power, and agency." - Publishers Weekly
This information about Lacuna was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Fiona Snyckers has written eight novels across various genres. In 2020, Lacuna won the South African Literary Award for best novel and the NIHSS Humanities Award for best novel. Snyckers has been nominated five times for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. She was educated at Rhodes University and at the University of the Witwatersrand. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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