Life & Times of Michael K

Life & Times of Michael K is a novel by the South African-Australian writer J. M. Coetzee, published in 1983. It won the Booker Prize that year.

Michael K was born with a cleft lip and has spent his childhood in institutions. He works as a gardener in Cape Town and looks after his mother, who is a domestic servant to a wealthy family. The country is descending into civil war and martial law is being imposed when she becomes very ill.

Michael gives up his job and sets out to take her back to the rural place she was born, which she says was Prince Albert. He cannot get permits to leave the city, so he builds a rough cart and pulls her himself. She dies in a hospital not long after they get out, leaving him alone with her ashes in a landscape crossed by roving armies, and the novel follows what he does with the rest of his life and with the small amount of dignity he insists on keeping.