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. For formal innovation and moral seriousness, Damon Galgut is very nearly without peer. And on this vastness, he stages intimate dramas that have the force of ancient myth.'-Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal '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'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. Galgut's fiction, South Africa materializes, vast, astonishing, resonant. Simply: you must read it.'-Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine 'Time and again in Mr. '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) '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.

The promise booker prize