Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief. “Home used to mean only one Thing, not a blizzard of things at war.” “How did it become so complicated?” Amor wonders at one point. Galgut’s multifarious writing style is bold and unusual, providing an initial barrier to entry yet achieving an intuitive logic over time. But the thought breaks off midway…”) to lyrical (“There’s a snory sound of bees, jacaranda blossoms pop absurdly underfoot”) to metafictional (“No need to dwell on how she washes away her tears”). The language is peppered with regional geography, terminology, and slang, with sentences ranging from clipped (“One day, she says aloud. Galgut moves fluidly among accounts of every single major and minor character, his prose unbroken by quotation marks or italics, as though narrated from the perspective of a ghost who briefly possesses every person. The promise is buried along with Rachel, only to be unearthed years later when subsequent family deaths force the Swarts to recollide for the rituals of mourning. Nobody else pays any mind: Amor is 13 years old at the start and functionally voiceless in her family. Only Amor, the youngest daughter, cares about her mother’s dying wish-that Salome, the Swarts’ domestic servant, receive full ownership of the house where she lives with her family, though under apartheid law, Black people are not legally allowed to own property in White areas. Her husband, Manie, and three children, Anton, Astrid, and Amor, are all walloped by different incarnations of grief. Recipients traditionally see a huge spike in sales.Three decades of South African sociopolitical history are woven into a saga of loss and missed opportunity that upends a dysfunctional Afrikaner family living outside Pretoria. Former winners include Iris Murdoch, Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantel. The Booker Prize winner receives £50,000 - over $68,000. With an almost deceptive narrative economy, it offers moving insights into generational divides meditates on what makes a fulfilling life - and how to process death and explores the capacious metaphorical implications of 'promise' in relation to modern South Africa.' On each reading we felt that the book grew.

The chair of this year's panel of Booker judges, Maya Jasanoff, described the selection in a statement: ' The Promise astonished us from the outset as a penetrating and incredibly well-constructed account of a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid and its aftermath. I'm fascinated as a writer by the edge of the map by things that are not said.' 'If the only thing you had was a small window that opened on to these four funerals and you didn't get the full trajectory of the family story, as a reader you'd have to fill in those gaps yourself. 'It occurred to me that it would be a novel and interesting way of approaching a family saga,' the author explained.

Reviews of the promise by damon galgut