Books like Boyhood by J. M. Coetzee

Professor David Lurie, a divorced academic in South Africa, faces professional exile after an affair with a student and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated farm, where the fallout of a violent encounter threatens their fragile existence.

In a remote frontier colony, a magistrate who has long governed in silence faces a moral crisis when a delegation of imperial interrogators arrives to root out a rumored barbarian presence. Compelled to defend the accused, he rebels against the empire and pays with imprisonment.

A historical fiction imagining the life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky in pre‑revolutionary St. Petersburg.

Two newcomers—an older man and a boy—arrive in a new land, learn Spanish, and are assigned new names. They navigate a desert camp, a relocation center, and the city of Novilla while the man searches for the boy’s mother, all amid themes of immigration, family, and fate.

In post‑war South Africa, Michael K journeys with his dying mother to her rural home, only to find himself alone amid chaotic armies. Imprisoned, he cannot endure confinement and escapes, striving to live with dignity.

Elizabeth Costello is a distinguished and aging Australian novelist whose life is revealed through a series of eight formal addresses. From an award-acceptance speech at a New England liberal arts college to a lecture on evil in Amsterdam and a sexually charged reading by the poet Robert Duncan, the author draws the reader toward its astonishing conclusion. The novel 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.

While marooned on an island in the Atlantic, Sue Barton finds herself a character in a fiction novel. She spends a year with two other castaways, a mute Negro called Friday and Robinson Cruso.

A humorous, autobiographical novel charting J. M. Coetzee’s formative years in Cape Town, as a biographer reconstructs his life through friends’ memories, revealing the writer’s awkward youth and emerging craft.

Mrs. Cullen, the narrator in this novel, is an elderly white woman dying of cancer in a country afflicted with its own mortal sickness. "In Cape Town, South Africa, an old woman is dying of cancer. A classics professor, Mrs. Curren has been opposed to the lies and brutality of apartheid all her life, but has lived insulated from its true horrors. Now she is suddenly forced to come to terms with the iron-hearted rage that the system has wrought. In an extended letter addressed to her daughter, who has long since fled to America, Mrs. Curren recounts the strange events of her dying days. She witnesses the burning of a nearby black township and discovers the bullet-riddled body of her servant's son. A teenage black activist hiding in her house is killed by security forces. And through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man, an alcoholic, who one day appears on her doorstep."--Goodreads.com.

On a remote farm in South Africa, the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee's fierce and passionate novel watches the life from which she has been excluded. Ignored by her callous father, scorned and feared by his servants, she is a bitterly intelligent woman whose outward meekness disguises a desperate resolve to not become "one of the forgotten ones of history."