When Susan Barton is marooned on an island in the Atlantic, she becomes more than a castaway-she finds herself a character in a fiction. For she will spend a year with two men whose names will become synonymous with islands: a mute Negro named Friday, and his master, Robinson Cruso.

Back in London, with Friday as evidence of her strange adventure, she approaches the author Daniel Foe. But Foe is less interested in the history of Robinson Cruso than in the story of Susan herself, and battle lines are drawn between writer and subject. Sole witness to this contest, as he was to the true history of Cruso's island, is the mute Friday.

J. M. Coetzee's new novel is a work of austere, exquisite brilliance. Fable, allegory, and literary palimpsest, it illuminates and interprets the poles to which our lives are pushed. But between these poles-of speech and silence, sanity and madness, truth and falsehood-lie the tensions that Coetzee makes rich and luminous: art, dream, and towering imagination.