DAMON GALGUT (b.1963)
The Promise. London: Chatto & Windus, 2021.
‘Nothing in a novel is private’: first UK edition of the 2021 Booker Prize winner, thoroughly annotated by the author with over 2400 words of commentary. The Promise spans four decades in the lives of a white South African family before and after the end of Apartheid. At its heart are the historical injustices of modern South Africa, exemplified by the failure of successive family members to fulfil a mother’s dying promise to her black domestic servant. Galgut provides a wealth of annotations, in a multitude of coloured inks, which offer unique insights into the formal structure of the work and his writing process. He highlights, for instance, subtle transitions of tone (‘from warm and close, to cold and distant’) and narrative voice (‘this is the first lapse into subjective consciousness – where the book signals its strangeness’), while also alerting us to the internal echoes throughout the text. He points out episodes in the narrative that derive from his own life and makes frequent reference to his literary influences, including Beckett, Joyce, Coetzee, Conrad, Faulkner and Dylan Thomas. On the blank endpapers at the rear of the volume is a charming inscription by another annotator – 11 year old Kashmira – who writes colourfully and playfully about ‘Aunty Damon’.

Octavo. Original dark grey boards, silver lettering to spine, pictorial dust jacket.

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