THE GOOD DOCTOR

222pp., paperback, Reprint, Cape Town, (2008) 2019

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Laurence, a young, idealistic doctor, takes up a posting at an ineffectual rural hospital in a former homeland of the new South Africa, and shares a room with Frank, a disillusioned, apathetic fellow doctor working there.

"If there is a posterity, The Good Doctor will be seen as one of the great literary triumphs of South Africa's transition, a novel that is in every way the equal of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace ... [Galgut is] a novelist of great and growing power." Rian Malan, author of My Traitor's Heart

A tremendous brave book. The author never flinches, and makes his hero's dark logic compelling and hair-rising ... Galgut writes like a man on a long fast night drive through bad places ... It's brilliant." Dermot Healy, author of A Goat's Song and Long Time, No See

"From the first page the reader is gripped by a rare twinning of convictions: that it is strange and new, and that the imaginative rendering is of the highest quality ... There are traces of J. M. Coetzee and Graham Greene but Damon Galgut is a true original." Geoff Dyer, author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanas and But Beautiful

Damon Galgut is the author of In a Strange Room (shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize), Arctic Summer and The Promise (shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize). In 2013, Galgut was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Cape Town.