“Coetzee’s new novel, Elizabeth Costello, published this week, follows a celebrated but self-doubting novelist as she travels from Amsterdam to South Africa to Massachusetts to the very gates of Heaven for a series of addresses on topics ranging from literary realism to the problem of evil to the fate of the humanities.

Coetzee has long been hailed as a powerful and controversial, if often oblique, commentator on the ravages of apartheid. But Elizabeth Costello, which was long-listed for this year’s Booker Prize, reveals little of Coetzee’s views on South Africa’s continued reckoning with its past. It does, however, raise another unsettled and unsettling question that is likely to make some readers deeply uncomfortable, even angry: By raising billions of animals a year in often squalid conditions before brutally slaughtering them for their meat and skin, are we all complicit in a ‘crime of stupefying proportions’?

Those words are Elizabeth Costello’s, whose two lectures on animal rights — ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the Animals’ — make up the longest section of the book. But the preoccupation is very much Coetzee’s own, and one that has moved increasingly close to the moral center of his work.” —Boston Globe