The book
Winner of the Sala Novel Award
Winner of the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for the Novel
A cry for reparations for Lucy Lurie. She is the victim of an act of terrible sexual violence that devastes 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 Withdrawn and fearful of crowds, Lucy nonetheless makes occasional forays into the world of men in her search for Coetzee himself.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.
The author
Fiona Snyckers
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.