The Promise
by Damon Galgut
They promised. They keep almost keeping the promise.
you want post-apartheid South Africa's unresolved business told through one family across thirty years
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A white South African family promises their dying mother that they will give their Black servant Salome the house she lives in on their property. Four funerals across thirty years — the mother, the father, the sister, the brother — and the promise never quite fulfilled. Galgut uses the structure of inheritance and death to track what South Africa has and hasn't resolved since 1994. Won the Booker Prize in 2021. The most elegant and damning dispatch from inside the gap between what post-apartheid South Africa promised and what it delivered.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- South Africa • Southern Africa
- Voice
- Written by a South African author
- Themes
- After Empire
