"Coetzee stirs our imaginations by confronting us with an articulate, intelligent, aging, and increasingly alienated novelist who cannot help but be exasperated with her fellow human beings, many of them academics, who are unnecessarily cruel to animals, and apparently (but not admittedly) committed to cruelty. The story urges us to reconceive our devotion to reason as a universal value."—From the introduction by Amy Gutmann

"Magnificent. . . . Coetzee's powerful and subtle text is irreducibly about real animal suffering, but it is also about much more."—Phil Baker, "Sunday Times" (London) [Edit review] [Delete review]