Elizabeth Costello is a distinguished and aging Australian novelist whose life is revealed through an ingenious series of eight formal addresses. Vividly imagined and masterfully wrought in unerring prose, this is, on its surface, the story of a woman"s life as mother, sister, lover, and writer. Yet it is also a profound and haunting meditation on the nature of storytelling that only a writer of Coetzee"s caliber could accomplish.