Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999)

It begins with a sentence of chilling self-satisfaction: a man of fifty-two, divorced, who believes he has solved the problem of sex rather well. David Lurie, a Romantics professor in Cape Town, seduces a student, refuses the repentance his hearing demands, and is cast out of his comfortable life. He retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding in the Eastern Cape, where a far greater violence arrives and leaves none of his certainties standing. Coetzee writes in prose so cold and exact it works like a scalpel, refusing to tell the reader how to feel even as it makes Lurie's blindness to the people around him impossible to ignore. Power in post-apartheid South Africa is shifting, and every structure that once made a man like him untouchable dissolves beneath his feet. By the close he is carrying the bodies of dead dogs from a welfare clinic with a care he never managed toward a single living person, and the book will not let you mistake it for redemption.