Masterful new fiction from twice Booker-shortlisted author Damon Galgut
Discover the powerful prizewinning story of a family in crisis.
Masterful new fiction from twice Booker-shortlisted author Damon Galgut
Discover the powerful prizewinning story of a family in crisis.
A taut and menacing novel that charts the crash and burn of an Afrikaans family, the Swarts. Punctuated by funerals that bring the ever-diminishing family together, each of the four parts opens with a death and a new decade.
The characterisations are razor sharp, the dialogue dramatic, the action gripping. As we traverse the decades, Damon interweaves the story of a disappointed nation from apartheid to Jacob Zuma.
“The Promise is fully rooted in contemporary South Africa, but the novel's weather moves into the elemental while attending also to the daily, the detailed and the personal. The book is close to a folktale or the retelling of a myth about fate and loss, about three siblings and land, a promise made and broken. The story has an astonishing sense of depth, as though the characters were imagined over time, with slow tender care.
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This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing
PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY (STARRED REVIEW) Damon Galgut's The Promise is about an unfulfilled but promising life and about the repeatedly broken promises by a white family to a black household worker. With unostentatious virtuosity Galgut - one of the world's great writers - enters the minds of all his characters, rich or poor, white or black, male or female, even the thoughts of a homeless man beset by visions. The language has a Flaubertian clarity and the intimate knowledge of the family is matched by an authoritative understanding of South Africa's complex history. This is the most important book of the last ten years
EDMUND WHITE
DAMON GALGUT is a novelist who has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize ( The Good Doctor and In A Strange Room ). His most recent novel, Arctic Summer , was nominated for the Walter Scott and Folio prizes and his fiction has been published in sixteen languages. A film adaptation of The Quarry , starring Michael Shannon, was released in 2020. Damon Galgut lives and works in Cape Town.
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