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Damon Galgut interview: ‘I have faith that novels will survive’

The Promise by Damon Galgut, against an orange background.

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Extracts

The Promise by Damon Galgut: read the first chapter

A photo of author Damn Galgut in greyscale, with his book The Promise overlaid next to him on an orange and red ombre background..

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Interviews

Lightbulb moments: Damon Galgut on writing The Promise

From the Booker prize-winning author of The Promise

The Quarry

An extremely atmospheric book in a hazy, raw and entirely realistic sense.... Galgut's story suggests that such points on the map, despite their ghostly quiet, are seething with repressed violence, ready to explode.... A compelling read about guilt and evasion of truth

In a bleak morality tale about a fugitive from justice, Galgut again demonstrates his flair for charting the vicissitudes of human despair in modern-day South Africa

An...uncompromising journey into the heart of South Africa's darkness, written in prose that is at once stark and striking. The Quarry is Galgut's homage to Dostoevsky

A remarkable achievement...Galgut's prose has a spare beauty, suggesting volcanic emotions held rigorously in check

This taut existential thriller...divulges little but manages to suggest volumes... Stark, almost brutal minimalism

The Quarry has [a] dry, feral quality... Galgut's landscape reminds a reader of Breyten Breytenbach's South Africa...roads leading to some vanishing point, the feeling of pursuit... The issues of guilt, injustice and redemption give the novel a biblical feel. The writing shines in its peripheral vision, in the backdrops and corners of its scenes

One of South Africa's great literary voices

[Galgut's] prose feels as if it's been fired through a crucible, burning away all the comfortable excess until only a hard, concentrated purity remains.... There are thrilling images here, powerful themes and almost scarily precise writing... Galgut is at the leading edge of what is turning out to be a brilliant documentation of South Africa's post-apartheid transition

A minimalist, almost allegorical story... Its tension is almost unbearable

[A] spare, intense story of rural South Africa... His clear, elemental prose is never generic

The scenes of township, quarry and shorescape have a strange, Beckett-like glow and menace

We not only read the narrative, but seem to be participating in the headlong rush of events.... A minor masterpiece. The Quarry is told in clear prose where every word counts and the plot and characters are utterly compelling

A slim, haunting work of poignancy and near perfection

Galgut writes here with a combination of JM Coetzee's uncluttered simplicity - every sentence stands out, and so seems pregnant with meaning - and Cormac McCarthy's rhythmic biblical dread

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.

Give yourself up. Whatever you've done. They'll find you. In the end. 
 
A man with no name staggers down a lonely stretch of road that cuts through the simmering veld of rural South Africa. He is exhausted and hungry yet dives for the long grass whenever cars approach. He is on the run. 
 
When a minister on his way to a new congregation offers help - at a price - the fugitive's desperation boils over. Stealing the minister's identity, he is successfully taken in by the township. But when a body is discovered in a nearby quarry, and the local police captain's suspicions grow, the hunt reignites with devastating consequences. 
 
'One of South Africa's great literary voices' Economist 
 
'Galgut's prose feels as if it's been fired through a crucible, burning away all the comfortable excess until only a hard, concentrated purity remains' Daily Telegraph

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021

The Promise

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 
 
One family. One promise. One chance to tell a new story. 
 
'A moving, brilliantly told family epic' Elizabeth Day 
 
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
On a farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for - not least their treatment of the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. Salome was to be given her own house, her own land...yet somehow, that vow is carefully ignored. 
 
As each decade passes, and the family assemble again, one question hovers over them. Can you ever escape the repercussions of a broken promise? 
 
 
'A tour de force... A spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh' Booker Judges, 2021 
 
'Astonishing' Colm Tóibín 
 
'Utterly compelling' Patrick Gale

A superb novel; a nuanced, sad, hilarious portrait of a family and a country

This story was so powerful, the writing so strong and supple... What an achievement

A moving, brilliantly told family epic . . . darkly comic . . . phenomenally good

Layered, clever...with a gripping story

A brilliant book told over four decades and four funerals . . . These are characters dancing on the edge of ruin . . . Intoxicating

Astonishing . . . about fate and loss, about three siblings and land, a promise made a broken

A remarkable tale of four generations of one South African family and of the country itself... No wonder it won the Booker

Vivid and suggestive, moving and often very funny

Outstanding . . . Gripping . . . There is also plenty of unexpected comedy

Brilliant... Rarely have I had such a strong sense, while reading a novel, that I myself was there, in the room with the characters

A dazzling feat of kaleidoscopic storytelling

Stunning . . . Galgut deploys every trick in the book; he's heart-swellingly attentive to emotional complexity . . .

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

Superbly narrated, Galgut's book combines state-of-the-nation novel . . . with something like allegory or even Christian parable

A strange, skilful, spellbinding eighth novel . . . Galgut explores grief, despair and love in a way that feels ageless . . . By the end of this enormously enjoyable novel, our laughter has become complicity and farce become force

A literary masterpiece of heart, soul and incorrupt wisdom. Galgut addresses conflict and reparation - both political and personal - with extraordinary skill, truthfulness and sensitivity.

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

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

A surprising number of novelists are very good; few are extraordinary. Like his compatriot J.M. Coetzee, the South African writer Damon Galgut is of this rare company . . . 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. Like other remarkable novels, it is uniquely itself, and greater than the sum of its parts. The Promise evokes, when you reach the final page, a profound interior shift that is all but physical. This, as an experience of art, happens only rarely, and is to be prized

I was mesmerised by The Promise, Damon Galgut's novel of the decline and fall of a South African family, told over four decades and four funerals. These are characters dancing on the edge of ruin, living out their lives around a family farm in Pretoria, a place suffused with the threat and consequence of violence. Galgut's prose is intoxicating, managing the rare feat of being utterly liberated and fiercely controlled. A brilliant book

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 Gotterdammerung 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

So acute, indeed, are Mr. Galgut's descriptions - of a character's inner life, a body's fragility, a family's shared wounds, a country's accumulated scars - that they seem like our perceptions, not his . . . 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

This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing

Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief

Galgut is a terrifically agile and consistently interesting novelist, certain up there with Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee as a chronicler of his nation's anguished complexity

[A] magnificent new novel. Galgut sweeps his ruthlessly forensic gaze over each of the protagonists...as well as the country at large

Labelled a masterpiece and one of the best novels of the year within a week of publication... Galgut is on his finest form as he explores grief, despair and love in his inimitable style. Read this book if nothing else this year.

[A] gripping, profound tale... a damning commentary on South Africa's many broken promises

Ingenious... The most distinctive element of the novel, and its greatest pleasure, is the effortless way Galgut flows from mind to mind and body to body, whether male, female, pubertal, menopausal, maturing, ageing or dying. It's almost uncanny

Surrender to the music of Galgut's prose, however, and the rewards are considerable

Excellent... The Promise is a powerful novel of character... [an] ambitious novel but, remarkably, Galgut rarely needs to strain for impact... his ability deftly to shift perspective from one character to the next creates a distinctive polyphonic effect

Politically chastening and technically superb. It's hard to see any novel beating it

This is the finest of all Damon Galgut's extraordinary novels. It reads as if the author has liberated himself from certain shackles he has needed in the past to convey the feelings of repression and social discomfort his people suffer... The writing - so impish, so playful - is a constant joy

Vivid and suggestive, moving and often very funny

Damon Galgut is the most worthy winner of the Booker prize we've seen for many years... The book trembles in the hand with its political relevance

A sobering allegory, to be sure, but also a giddy pleasure, thanks to Galgut's restlessly acrobatic narrative voice, which darts and zooms unpredictably around the action

A dazzling feat of kaleidoscopic storytelling

I would have chosen this novel before it won the Booker... What makes it special is the humanity with which it is written and Galgut's cinematic prose, which shifts seamlessly from one perspective to the next

The Promise...is a remarkable tale of four generations of one South African family and of the country itself. Like his earlier books, it reveals him as a master of human complexity. No wonder it won the Booker

A complex, clever, wryly observant tale of one family's decline amid a nation's birth

[A] masterful, sweeping novel... a piercing dissection of a country at a decisive historical junction and the intersection of socio-political events and private life

The Promise is just 300 pages long, but Galgut shows his skills as a concise and piercing novelist by packing so much into this exceptional book

A layered, clever and sometimes uncomfortable read, but with a gripping story

A remarkably successful combination of formal discipline and finely observed characterisation, it was a worthy winner of the 2021 Booker prize

The judges of this year's Booker prize rightly crowned this outstanding multigenerational saga... The morally chewy scenario is given extra zest by an acrobatic narrative voice full of trickery

A joyful masterclass in fiction... a dizzying adventure that underlines one of the most appealing things about fiction: it is the closest we can ever get to inhabiting other perspectives

Gentle, precise, insightful, melancholy but warm

Shehan Karunatilaka, author of THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA

Damon Galgut

One of the world's greatest writers

Remarkable...astonishingly mature, subtle and understated

Galgut explores grief, despair and love in a way that feels ageless

In Mr. Galgut's fiction South Africa materialises, vast, astonishing, resonant. And on this vastness, he stages intimate dramas that have the force of ancient myth

The first collection of extraordinary stories from one of the greatest writers of our time. 
 
With astonishing clarity, Booker Prize winner Galgut explores both the intimacies and violence of family life against the complex landscape of 1980s South Africa. 
 
From a mother who experiences a devastating unmooring after her child falls gravely ill, to a son retracing his late father's brief yet passionate affair, the stories ripple out from one another, tenderly exposing those bonds we cannot escape. 
 
PRAISE FOR DAMON GALGUT: 
 
'Galgut seems to deliver effortlessly...there's nothing he can't do' Times 
 
'Damon Galgut is very nearly without peer...an essential writer' Garth Greenwell 
 
'Terrifically agile and consistently interesting...certainly up there with Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee' Guardian

Damon Galgut

Praise for Small Circle of Beings

One of the world's greatest writers

Remarkable...astonishingly mature, subtle and understated

Galgut explores grief, despair and love in a way that feels ageless

One of the world's greatest writers

Remarkable...astonishingly mature, subtle and understated

Galgut explores grief, despair and love in a way that feels ageless

One of the world's greatest writers

Remarkable...astonishingly mature, subtle and understated

Galgut explores grief, despair and love in a way that feels ageless

Books by Damon Galgut

Articles featuring Damon Galgut

Powerful stories that make great gifts

Damon Galgut interview: ‘I have faith that novels will survive’

The Promise by Damon Galgut: read the first chapter

Lightbulb moments: Damon Galgut on writing The Promise

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