BVBook Verdict
Essential Read

The Promise

by Damon Galgut · 2021

Literary Fiction · ranked #223 in category

Winner · The Booker Prize, 2021

Three generations of a white South African family gather for funerals across four decades — 1986, 1996, 2004 and 2018 — and a promise made by the dying matriarch to leave a small house to the family's Black servant, Salome, remains unfulfilled at each one. Galgut's Booker Prize-winning novel is a portrait of South Africa from apartheid to the present, told through a family's accumulating broken promises.

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The verdict

Category
Literary Fiction
First published
2021 · 2020s
Author
Damon Galgut
Standing
Essential Read

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