Dreamlike yet so solidly well-made, The Promise has lived on inside my head, unsettling and troubling me Tessa Hadley It's richly evocative of the land and its people, and reports on a new South Africa without fake moralising it made me laugh, too. The Promise is a gorgeous and pleasurable novel, with an imaginative heft to match Galgut's fellow South African writers Gordimer, Coetzee and Brink. Galgut's prose is intoxicating, managing the rare feat of being utterly liberated and fiercely controlled. These are characters dancing on the edge of ruin, living out their lives around a family farm in Pretoria, a place suffused with the threat and consequence of violence. I was mesmerised by The Promise, Damon Galgut's novel of the decline and fall of a South African family, told over four decades and four funerals. He is an essential writer Garth Greenwell For formal innovation and moral seriousness, Damon Galgut is very nearly without peer. The Promise recalls the great achievements of modernism in its imagistic brilliance, its caustic disenchantment, its relentless research into the human. This is an emotionally powerful and thrilling novel that haunts one long after it has been laid down Gabriel Byrne Galgut understands the complexities of the human heart which he reveals with the finest delicacy. The effect is utterly compelling Patrick Gale Its indignation at its morally bankrupt central characters is leavened with languid comedy, as though Galgut had collaborated with Tennessee Williams. Fuelled by sex and death, this is a South African Gotterdammerung charting a white family's inexorable decline from significance and power. If possible, The Promise packs yet more of a punch than Galgut's previous novels. Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief Kirkus 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) ** A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH, i AND NEW STATESMAN ** Read more
Can you ever escape the repercussions of a broken promise?
Salome was to be given her own house, her own land.yet somehow, that vow is carefully ignored.Īs each decade passes, and the family assemble again, one question hovers over them. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for - not least their treatment of the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. On a farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral. 'A masterpiece - a moving, brilliantly told family epic' Elizabeth Day A spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh' Booker Judges, 2021 Winner of the Booker Prize 2021 - discover the powerful story of a family in crisis.ĭiscover the Sunday Times bestselling story of a family in crisis.
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