★ “Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
★ “This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
★ “Galgut’s compelling new novel blends characters and history and intricate themes to reveal the devastating impacts of white privilege and institutional racism…The Promise is timely, relevant, and thematically significant.”—Booklist (Starred Review)
“The novel carries within it the literary spirits of Woolf and Joyce... To praise the novel in its particulars—for its seriousness; for its balance of formal freedom and elegance; for its humor, its precision, its human truth—seems inadequate and partial. Simply: you must read it.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine
“Galgut’s novel most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner. The novel’s beautifully peculiar narration aerates and complicates this fatal family fable, and turns plot into deep meditation... Galgut is wonderfully, Woolfianly adept.”—James Wood, The New Yorker
“Time and again in Mr. Galgut’s fiction, South Africa materializes, vast, astonishing, resonant. And on this vastness, he stages intimate dramas that have the force of ancient myth.”—Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal
“The Promise offers all the virtues of realist fiction, plus some extras. A reader can shrug it all off and focus on the family’s story, or take pleasure in a brash writer’s narrative norm-breaking… In comparison [to Coetzee], Galgut is a gleeful satirist, mordantly skewering his characters’ fecklessness and hypocrisy.”—Rand Richards Cooper, The New York Times Book Review
“This bravura novel about the undoing of a bigoted South African family during apartheid deserves awards.”—The Guardian
“A family saga that moves from the 1980s to the present, it’s a complex, ambitious and brilliant work—one that provides Galgut’s fullest exploration yet of the poisonous legacy of apartheid.”—Financial Times (UK)
“A South African family saga bursting with life is one of the best books of the year.”—The Times (UK)
“A magisterial, heart-stopping novel.”—The Times Literary Supplement
“The unusual narrative style balances a kind of Faulknerian exuberance with a Nabokovian precision and is a testament to the flourishing of the novel in the 21st century. The novel can best be summed up in the question: Does true justice exist in the world—and if so, what might that look like? This novel’s way of tackling this question makes it an accomplishment and truly deserving of its place on the shortlist.”—Chigozie Obioma, 2021 Booker Prize judge and author of The Fisherman and An Orchestra of Minorities
“The Promise is the most important book of the last ten years.”—Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story and A Saint from Texas
“The Promise is close to a folk tale or the retelling of a myth about fate and loss... The story has an astonishing sense of depth, as though the characters were imagined over time, with slow tender care.”—Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn
“The Promise’s power and immediacy merge to create an outstanding novel of its time.”—Joan Bakewell, author of All the Nice Girls and The Centre of the Bed
“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 and What Belongs to You
“Both tender and brutal, The Promise brilliantly illuminates how both a small family and a large world endure—or don't endure. I will remember this beautifully devastating book, its enigmatic heroine, for a long time.”—Peter Cameron, author of What Happens at Night
“Galgut understands the complexities of the human heart which he reveals with the finest delicacy. This is an emotionally powerful and thrilling novel that haunts one long after it has been laid down.” —Gabriel Byrne, author of Walking With Ghosts and Pictures in My Head
“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
“If there is a posterity, Galgut will be seen as one of the great literary triumphs of South Africa’s transition... in every way the equal of J. M. Coetzee.”—Rian Malan, author of My Traitor’s Heart
★ 2021-03-03
Three decades of South African sociopolitical history are woven into a saga of loss and missed opportunity that upends a dysfunctional Afrikaner family living outside Pretoria.
Rachel Swart has just died of cancer. Her husband, Manie, and three children, Anton, Astrid, and Amor, are all walloped by different incarnations of grief. Only Amor, the youngest daughter, cares about her mother’s dying wish—that Salome, the Swarts’ domestic servant, receive full ownership of the house where she lives with her family, though under apartheid law, Black people are not legally allowed to own property in White areas. Nobody else pays any mind: Amor is 13 years old at the start and functionally voiceless in her family. The promise is buried along with Rachel, only to be unearthed years later when subsequent family deaths force the Swarts to recollide for the rituals of mourning. Galgut moves fluidly among accounts of every single major and minor character, his prose unbroken by quotation marks or italics, as though narrated from the perspective of a ghost who briefly possesses every person. The language is peppered with regional geography, terminology, and slang, with sentences ranging from clipped (“One day, she says aloud. One day I’ll. But the thought breaks off midway…”) to lyrical (“There’s a snory sound of bees, jacaranda blossoms pop absurdly underfoot”) to metafictional (“No need to dwell on how she washes away her tears”). Galgut’s multifarious writing style is bold and unusual, providing an initial barrier to entry yet achieving an intuitive logic over time. “How did it become so complicated?” Amor wonders at one point. “Home used to mean only one Thing, not a blizzard of things at war.”
Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief.
