Fiona Snyckers’s new literary novel LACUNA is a searing, exhilarating and moving response to JM Coetzee’s Booker Prize winning novel DISGRACE.

Lucy Lurie is struggling through PTSD following a gang rape at her father’s farmhouse. The Lucy of Coetzee’s fiction is a passive, peaceful creature, almost entirely lacking in agency. She is the lacuna in Coetzee’s novel—the missing piece of the puzzle.

The Lucy Lurie of Fiona Snyckers’ imagination is no one’s lacuna. Her attempts to claw back her life, and her voice after being gang raped may be messy and misguided, but she won’t be silenced. Her rape is not a metaphor. This is her story.

‘A powerful and brilliant critique of both JM Coetzee’s DISGRACE and contemporary South Africa … Fiona Snyckers makes the reader ponder deeply one minute and laugh loudly the next. A must read.’ Zukiswa Wanner.

‘This book is going to be one of those books we all recognise as one of the most important and best recent novels.’ Eusebius McKaiser, outspoken South African intellectual and broadcaster.

In an interview with Polity SA, Snyckers was asked whether a male writer has the authority to write about a female rape survivor, as Coetzee did in DISGRACE.

‘That is a very difficult question and it’s something that I really wrestled with in this book,’ Snyckers said. ‘I started off thinking, no, what gives you the right as a male writer to talk about such an intimate female experience in this way. But in the end I couldn’t stick to it, I had to come down on the side of, anybody can tell any story. I can’t say, “you can only tell this story and you can only tell that story”. ‘But if you are going to tell a story, you must be prepared for criticism, and you must be prepared for somebody to set up a counter-narrative to your story.’

The book is published in South Africa by Pan Macmillan, click here to enquire about available rights.