THE PROMISE

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