Rukun Advani, who started Permanent Black after his unceremonious departure from Oxford University Press, is under the spell of Booker prize-winner J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. The novel is about a successful professor of English literature who is unexpectedly faced with a catastrophe that changes his life forever. Betrayed by his student lover and his colleagues, the professor seeks refuge in his daughter's farm, where she too is struck by a parallel disaster. The no-frills writing is at once "bitchy, pungent, sharp". "A stunningly good novel," says Rukun.