About this Event
Join us for a fantastic evening with 2021 Booker Prize winner, Damon Galgut, as we celebrate the paperback release of his prize-winning novel, The Promise. The evening will be in-conversation with Simon Savidge.
The Promise charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living 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 the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land... yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.
The narrator's eye shifts and blinks: moving fluidly between characters, flying into their dreams; deliciously lethal in its observation. And as the country moves from old deep divisions to its new so-called fairer society, the lost promise of more than just one family hovers behind the novel's title.
In this story of a diminished family, sharp and tender emotional truths hit home. Confident, deft and quietly powerful, The Promise is literary fiction at its finest.
Damon Galgut is a South African novelist who won the 2021 Booker Prize for The Promise.
Born in Pretoria, Galgut was diagnosed with cancer at the age of six – a horrific experience ameliorated only by his relatives reading stories to him whilst he convalesced. Galgut channelled this love of storytelling into his own work and produced his debut novel in 1982 at the age of just seventeen. This was followed by the short story collection Small Circle of Beings (1988) and the novel The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991) which scooped South Africa’s prestigious CNA prize. Galgut’s breakout success was The Good Doctor, a tale of friendship and betrayal set in post-Apartheid South Africa, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize. Galgut was also nominated for the Booker Prize in 2010 for In a Strange Room – a story of three interlinked journeys through Greece, India and Africa – before triumphing in 2021 with the sweeping family saga The Promise.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Waterstones, 12 College Lane, Liverpool, United Kingdom
GBP 4.00 to GBP 5.00