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The Promise: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner) Hardcover – April 6, 2021
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WINNER OF THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
A modern family saga written in gorgeous prose by three-time Booker Prize-shortlisted author Damon Galgut.
Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the atmosphere of its country—one of resentment, renewal, and, ultimately, hope. The Promise is an epic drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of national history, sure to please current fans and attract many new ones.
“Simply: you must read it.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherEuropa Editions
- Publication dateApril 6, 2021
- Dimensions5.9 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-101609456580
- ISBN-13978-1609456580
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From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
★ “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
“The plot is just the vehicle for a story that reveals the dark heart of South Africa’s recent and turbulent history; apartheid, conscription, peace and reconciliation are all glossed. In The Promise is a kind of fluid narrativity which means we, the reader, are literally swept along, while Galgut pays a very direct tribute to Joyce in the final cadenced pages. He’s done it with mastery, guile, and a generous amount of empathy. The Promise is a masterpiece.”—Independent.ie
“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
“Riveting... Galgut’s most ambitious novel to date...The Promise is different from his other books. It’s more specific in its depictions of this starkly divided society, more direct in the way it approaches what has always been the country’s most significant political issue, its central injustice: the land and whom it belongs to... The Promise’s power lies in its measured, exacting, occasionally cruel depiction of the way the land question has irretrievably warped almost every character in the novel, whether or not they are capable of acknowledging it.”—New York Review of Books
“I would hope this turns up the volume from our side and that it’s heard more clearly on the other.”—Los Angeles Times
“This powerful, emotionally charged novel ... charts the wayward progress and mixed fortunes of Rachel's racist husband, Manie, and their three children through subsequent decades, while simultaneously depicting a nation undergoing tumultuous change.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“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 Promise by Damon Galgut is an exceptional book, beautifully written with characters you come to care deeply about.”—BBC
“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
About the Author
Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria. His 2003 novel The Good Doctor won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In a Strange Room (Europa, 2010) was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2021, Galgut won the Booker Prize for The Promise (Europa, 2021). In 2013, Galgut was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
Product details
- Publisher : Europa Editions (April 6, 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1609456580
- ISBN-13 : 978-1609456580
- Item Weight : 14.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.9 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #375,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,068 in Family Saga Fiction
- #6,409 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #20,241 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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This story is told in four long sections. I think it was best to read a full section in one sitting when possible, as there were not really good stopping points in the sections. Of the four sections, my favorite section was the one titled Astrid. That section shocked me the most, especially the death that occurred in it.
Something I have seen mentioned a lot in reviews of this novel is the writing style. The writing flows between many characters, including more minor characters in the overall scheme of the story. The writing forced me to slow down my reading more than how I normally read so that I could really focus on what was happening in the book. While I don’t think that is a bad thing, I do think that the writing kept me feeling a bit removed from the primary characters. I wanted to feel the emotions in the story deeper and delve more into the lives of the characters, especially Amor.
I can definitely understand how this novel won the Booker prize. It seems like a book that is worthy of discussion.
But that promise is not kept. The country is in turmoil and Manie, the father, believes that giving his servant property will only make things more uncertain. Those who came in and took the land from the natives are now uneasy, unsure what the future will hold and if those same natives will now take the land back from them. Amor can't believe that her father would renege on the promise he made to her mother on her deathbed.
Over the coming years, the family slowly dies off. At each death, Amor reminds those surviving of the promise but the house is never deeded over to Salome. This has the effect of removing Amor further and further from those she grew up with. She becomes a nurse in an HIV ward and spends her life serving others.
This book won the Booker Prize in 2021. It is a tale of white privilege and the interaction of what are seen as interlopers and those who were native to the land. This was the time of apartheid in South Aftica and Galgut as a South African native is uniquely situated to explore this theme. The family drifts apart over the years as each carves out a life that they think is best for them while the land endures and exists as always. Amor is a character whose selflessness the reader will remember long after the book is done. This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.
Over the next years, Amor advocates again and again for the land gift to occur and, in doing so, becomes alienated from her family. She leaves home as soon as she is of age. Each time Amor returns home she again advocates for the land to go to Salome, always unsuccessfully. The family continues to drift further apart with Amor ultimately has no contact with them.
A parallel in the book is the country’s turmoil surrounding apartheid and the regime’s continuously imposed state of emergency, the ending of apartheid and the World Cup being hosted in the country does fill its citizens, black or white, with a sense of communal pride. Yet, what follows is another corrupt government, increases in crime rates, dishonesty and a lack of integrity and once again, promises unfulfilled. “Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It's just the living part we still have to work out.”
A powerful novel with interesting characters in a time of turmoil, both in the country and in the homes. The story is very slow for the first half and, having heard good things about it, I was determined to finish. It does move at a better pace in the second half and I am glad that I finished it. The ending is almost haunting. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize.
Top reviews from other countries
Once I’ve adapted, the read was very enjoyable, I find myself pondering and processing a lot while reading. The book touches upon many perspectives, more then half that gets brought up again. Within these perspectives, you see how cold and hard life can be in South Africa, but the life there is about being patient and adapt to have a good life.
The book writes itself while reading the second half, at that point you are glad for remembering all the little things said. Reacting to their reactions more and more strongly. Been awhile since a book made me cry in public, and visibly upset with the thoughts portrayed in this book.
Thinking of rereading for the fact I don’t need to figure who the speaker is anymore. Just means it gets better for the second read. Such as rereading one segment, realizing it was actually a different character speaking at that point. Chuckled at that. This book requires ‘No Distractions!’ When reading, you will find yourself rereading the last two or three paragraphs to figure out context and speaker.
It is set in South Africa but it is not About South Africa. It is a universal story that transcends politics and history.
The story seems to suggest that care and sharing are the only real option for a life of meaning amidst the pain and decline in South Africa.