J. M. Coetzee’s “ Age of Iron” is another example of why this author in particular has won both the Booker Prize & the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here, J. M. Coetzee brings his insight & deft use of language to bear on one of the darkest episodes of our times. In Cape Town, South Africa, an elderly classics professor writes a letter to her distant daughter, recounting the strange & disturbing events of her dying days. She has been opposed to the lies & brutality of apartheid all her life, but now she finds herself coming face-to-face with its true horrors: the hounding by the police of her servant`s son, the burning of a nearby black township, the murder by security forces of a teenage activist who seeks refuge in her house. Through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger & despair, is a homeless man who one day appears on her doorstep.