The Childhood Of Jesus

This is an extraordinary new fable from one of the world's greatest living novelists, two-time Booker Prize winner and Nobel Laureate. David is a small boy who comes by boat across the ocean to a new country. He has been separated from his parents, and has lost the piece of paper that would have explained everything. On the boat a stranger named Simon takes it upon himself to look after the boy. On arrival they are assigned new names, new birthdates. They know little Spanish, the language of their new country, and nothing about its customs. They have also suffered a kind of forgetting of old attachments and feelings. They are people without a past. Simon's goal is to find the boy's mother. He feels sure he will know her when he sees her. And David? He wants to find his mother too but he also wants to understand where he is and how he fits in. He is a boy who is always asking questions. The Childhood of Jesus is not like any other novel you have read. This beautiful and surprising fable is about childhood, about destiny, about being an outsider. It is a novel about the riddle of experience itself. J.M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He lives in Adelaide. 'Coetzee is a master we scarcely deserve.' Age 'Coetzee gradually, with great intelligence and skill, brings to extraordinary - possibly divine - life an ostensibly simple story.' Weekend Australian 'A theological and philosophical fable of considerable brilliance, power and wit. Coetzee hasn't done anything as fine and beautifully executed as this since Disgrace.' Canberra Times and Age '[A] quiet, haunting novel...Coetzee's calm, emblematic prose lifts the plot into something redolent with metaphor and mystery...Any statement can become a symbol; every event is suffused with potential revelation; something magical is always present and just out of reach...It's a memorable accomplishment, turning the everyday into the almost everlasting.' Weekend Herald (NZ) 'Double Booker Prize-winner Coetzee's fable has a dream-like, Kafkaesque quality. Are we in some kind of heaven, purgatory or simply another staging post of existence? Clear answers are elusive, but this is a riveting, thought-provoking read and surely Coetzee's best novel since Disgrace more than a decade ago.' Daily Mail 'Written with all of Coetzee's penetrating rigour, it will be an early contender for an unprecedented third Booker prize.' Observer 'The Childhood of Jesus represents a return to the allegorical mode that made him famous...a Kafkaesque version of the nativity story...The Childhood of Jesus does ample justice to his giant reputation: it's richly enigmatic, with regular flashes of Coetzee's piercing intelligence.' Guardian 'The sense of calm, furthered by Coetzee's spare prose, is very unsettling...These are not the horrors of Waiting for the Barbarians, this is the horror of banality.' Independent on Sunday

From the double Booker Prize-winning author of Disgrace, an astonishing novel of new beginnings and the troubles of youth. 'Brilliant... Tenaciously absorbing' Daily Telegraph David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language, he has begun to make friends and he has the big dog Bolívar to watch over him. But he'll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. Yet it's here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what adults are capable of. The Schooldays of Jesus is a mesmerising tale about growing up, and about the choices we are forced to make in our lives. 'Compelling, often very funny, full of sudden depths' Observer Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2016

The luminous new novel from 'one of the best writers of our time', double Booker Prize winner J. M. Coetzee. 'Full of truth, tearfully moving to read... Brilliant' Evening Standard Simón and David - a tall ten-year-old - are in a new land, together with a woman named Inés. The small family have found a home in which David can thrive. But David is spotted by Julio Fabricante, the director of a local orphanage, playing football with his friends. He shows unusual talent. When David announces that he wants to live with Julio and the children in his care, Simón and Inés are stunned. David is leaving them, and they can only love him and bear witness. The Death of Jesus is the completion of an incomparable trilogy in which J. M. Coetzee explores the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions. * A New York Times Notable Book * ___________________ 'Extraordinary... Coetzee stands as the pre-eminent novelist in the English-writing world' New Statesman 'You will read its cool, dry final sentences - as I did - with tears in your eyes' The Times

Takes the reader on an incredible journey with the Christ Child from His birth in a humble setting, to His sojourn in Egypt and return to Nazareth, and finally to His three days in the temple, where His teachings were so profound as to astonish all who were in attendance. At each stage of Jesus' life, Jakob Lorber is able to introduce the many relationships that comprise Jesus' family and friends and how the Christ Child, from infant to young boy, taught lessons of love, forgiveness, and mercy to them. Not only His words, but His miracles and acts of power, bear witness to the divinity and Lordship of the Christ. In these little-known and forgotten years of His Childhood that Lorber has illuminated, readers will be strengthened in their faith and also gain new insights into scriptures that the Christ Child uses in His teachings in the temple. An absolute must-read for old and young alike.

The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years - except Biff, the Messiah's best bud, who has been resurrected to tell the story in this divinely hilarious, yet heartfelt work 'reminiscent of Vonnegut and Douglas Adams' (Philadelphia Inquirer). Verily, the story Biff has to tell is a miraculous one, filled with remarkable journeys, magic, healings, kung fu, corpse reanimations, demons, and hot babes, Even the considerable wiles and devotion of the Saviour's pal may not be enough to divert Joshua from his tragic destiny. But there's no one who loves Josh more - except maybe 'Maggie,' Mary of Magdala - and Biff isn't about to let his extraordinary pal suffer and ascend without a fight.

From the double Booker Prize-winning author of Disgrace, 'a moving story of lost childhood' (Sunday Telegraph). After crossing oceans, a man and a boy - both strangers to each other - arrive in a new land. David, the boy, has lost his mother and Simón vows to look after him. In this strange country they are each assigned a new name, a new birthday, a new life. Knowing nothing of their surroundings, nor the language or customs, they are determined to find David's mother. Though the boy has no memory of her, Simón is certain he will recognise her at first sight. 'But after we find her,' David asks, 'what are we here for?' The Childhood of Jesus is a profound, beautiful and continually surprising novel from a very great writer. 'Powerful and poetic... This book will continue to act, silently and unexpectedly, on the reader's imagination' Financial Times

The mid-second-century apocryphal infancy gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, which deals with the childhood of Jesus from age five to age twelve, has attained only limited interest from scholars. Much research into the story has also been seriously misguided - especially study of the story's origin, character, and setting. This book gives a fresh interpretation of the infancy gospel, not least by applying a variety of new approaches, including orality studies, narrative studies, gender studies, and social-scientific approaches. The book comes to a number of radically new conclusions: The Gospel of Thomas is dependent on oral storytelling and has far more narrative qualities than has been previously assumed. The narrative world depicted in the gospel is that of middle-class Christianity, with the social and cultural ideas and values characteristic of such a milieu. The gospel's theology is not heretical - as has often been claimed - but mirrors mainstream thinking rooted in biblical tradition, particularly in the Johannine and Lukan traditions. Jesus is portrayed as a divine figure but also as a true-to-life child of late antiquity. The audience for the Gospel of Thomas is likely to have come from the rural population of early Christianity, a milieu that has received little attention. A main audience for the story was children among early Christians, making this - at least within Christianity - the oldest-known children's tale. The book provides a Greek text and a translation, andseveral appendixes on the story, along with other early Christian infancy material.