Age of Iron

Age of Iron is a 1990 novel by South African Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. It is among his most popular works.

The novel depicts the agony of Mrs. Curren, a classically educated white woman. She lives in the Cape Town of the apartheid era, where she is slowly dying of cancer. Against a backdrop of violence by whites and blacks alike, Mrs. Curren remembers her past and her daughter, who left South Africa because of the situation in the country: the book is framed as an extended letter from the mother to her distant offspring. As the story progresses, she constructs a relationship of a different kind with Vercueil, an old black man who happens upon her home.

Coetzee brings together important themes in this book: the drama of a tragic end of life, the separation of mother and daughter, a strange friendship between diametrically opposed people, and the metaphor of decay from within — atop which is painted a picture of social and political tragedy unfolding in an undeveloped country.

• ISBN 0140275657