The Promise: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)

The Promise: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)

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 ★ “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 questi