243pp., paperback, Cape Town, 2021

Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize.

Haunted by an unfulfilled promise, three siblings drift apart after the death of their mother, to be reunited at four family funerals over three decades.

“If possible, The Promise packs yet more of a punch than Galgut’s previous novels. Fuelled by sex and death, this is a South African Götterdämmerung charting a white family’s inexorable decline from significance and power. Its indignation at its morally bankrupt central characters is leavened with languid comedy, as though Galgut had collaborated with Tennessee Williams. The effect is utterly compelling.” Patrick Gale, author of Notes from an Exhibition and A Place Called Winter

“Both tender and brutal, The Promise brilliantly illuminates how both a small family and a large world endure - or don't endure. It is both tender and brutal, and Amor, its enigmatic heroine, is the most fascinating character I've encountered in recent fiction. I will remember her, and this beautifully devastating book, for a long time” Peter Cameron, author of What Happens at Night

"The Promise recalls the great achievements of modernism in its imagistic brilliance, its caustic disenchantment, its relentless research into the human. For formal innovation and moral seriousness, Damon Galgut is very nearly without peer. He is an essential writer." Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness

Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria in 1963. His novel, The Good Doctor (2003), won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book) and was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His latest novels are In a Strange Room (2010), shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and Arctic Summer (2014). He lives in Cape Town.

THE PROMISE

: Galgut (D.)

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