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Imprint: Vintage
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Published: 03/03/2022
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ISBN: 9781529113877
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Length: 288 Pages
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Dimensions: 198mm x 15mm x 129mm
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Weight: 200g
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RRP: £8.99
The Promise
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WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021
**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021**
'A tour de force... A spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh' Booker Judges, 2021
Discover the powerful prizewinning story of a family in crisis.
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 NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 AND ONE OF THE DAILY TELEGRAPH'S 75 BEST BOOKS OF 2021 **
'Astonishing' Colm Tóibín
'A masterpiece - one of the best books I have read in the past decade... A moving, brilliantly told family epic' Elizabeth Day
'This is so obviously one of the best novels of the year' The Times
'Utterly compelling' Patrick Gale
'Gorgeous and pleasurable' Tessa Hadley
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Imprint: Vintage
-
Published: 03/03/2022
-
ISBN: 9781529113877
-
Length: 288 Pages
-
Dimensions: 198mm x 15mm x 129mm
-
Weight: 200g
-
RRP: £8.99
Reviews
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Stunning . . . Galgut deploys every trick in the book; he's heart-swellingly attentive to emotional complexity . . .
Anthony Cummins, Observer
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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!"
John Self, The Times
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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
Nat Segnit, Times Literary Supplement
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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
William Skidelsky, Financial Times
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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
Colm Tóibín
