Masterful new fiction from twice Booker-shortlisted author Damon Galgut, 'one of the world's great writers' (Edmund White) and 'the bold, fresh voice of South African fiction' (Observer)
DAMON GALGUT is the author of nine novels. He won the Booker Prize 2021 for The Promise, having been shortlisted for the prize twice before (The Good Doctor and In A Strange Room). He lives and works in Cape Town.
A superb novel; a nuanced, sad, hilarious portrait of a family and
a country
*PAULA HAWKINS*
This story was so powerful, the writing so strong and supple...
What an achievement
*CLARE CHAMBERS*
A moving, brilliantly told family epic . . . darkly comic . . .
phenomenally good
*ELIZABETH DAY*
Layered, clever...with a gripping story
*Daily Mail, Books of the Year*
A brilliant book told over four decades and four funerals . . .
These are characters dancing on the edge of ruin . . .
Intoxicating
*ANNA HOPE*
Astonishing . . . about fate and loss, about three siblings and
land, a promise made a broken
*COLM TOIBIN*
A remarkable tale of four generations of one South African family
and of the country itself... No wonder it won the Booker
*Observer, Books of the Year*
Vivid and suggestive, moving and often very funny
*Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year*
Outstanding . . . Gripping . . . There is also plenty of unexpected
comedy
*BBC News*
Brilliant... Rarely have I had such a strong sense, while reading a
novel, that I myself was there, in the room with the characters
*Financial Times*
A dazzling feat of kaleidoscopic storytelling
*The Times, Books of the Year*
Stunning . . . Galgut deploys every trick in the book; he's
heart-swellingly attentive to emotional complexity . . .
*Observer*
Galgut seems to deliver effortlessly...there's nothing he can't
do... [his] style is quiet but the book feels bursting with life
because of all the of all the off-page, between-times details he
hints at... This is so obviously one of the best novels of the
year... a book that answers the question "what is a novel for?"
With a simple: "This!"
*The Times*
The Promise functions as a spare but thoroughly satisfying parable,
the decline of the Swarts into moral degeneracy and death tracing
the forsaken promises of the post-apartheid era, from early hope to
the contemporary realities of corruption and racial enmity . . .
[a] magisterial, heart-stopping novel
*Times Literary Supplement*
A complex, ambitious and brilliant work - one that provides
Galgut's fullest exploration yet of the poisonous legacy of
apartheid . . . Galgut describes his characters with rare assurance
and skill, conjuring them to life in a narrative voice that moves
restlessly from character to character . . . Rarely have I had such
a strong sense, while reading a novel, that I myself was there, in
the room with the characters
*Financial Times*
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
*Colm Tóibín*
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*
Remarkable . . . The Promise suggests that the demands of history
and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge .
. . the novel's beautifully peculiar narration aerates and
complicates this fatal family fable, and turns plot into deep
meditation . . . Galgut is wonderfully, Woolfianly adept at moving
quickly between characters' thoughts
*New Yorker*
The Promise is a gorgeous and pleasurable novel, with an
imaginative heft to match Galgut's fellow South African writers
Gordimer, Coetzee and Brink. 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. Dreamlike yet so solidly
well-made, The Promise has lived on inside my head, unsettling and
troubling me
*Tessa Hadley*
The Promise by Damon Galgut is a masterpiece - one of the best
books I have read in the past decade and definitely my book of the
year so far. Galgut is a master of the form. His free-flowing prose
moves effortlessly from inside one character's head to another and
displays a wealth of compassion and insight from multiple
perspectives. This novel is a moving, brilliantly-told family epic
with political resonance which also manages in parts to be darkly
comic. Phenomenally good
*Elizabeth Day*
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