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Literary Fiction · MelancholicA white South African family keeps failing to keep a promise to its Black servant, across four funerals
The Promise
by Damon Galgut
2021242 pagesModerate readSteady pace
★ Booker Prize, 2021
A family and an unkept promise
The Swart family in South Africa has promised to give their servant Salome a house. As the decades pass, from the end of apartheid to the present, the promise is forgotten and renewed, and the family is held together by funerals. It won the 2021 Booker Prize.
More about this book
Who
The Swart family and Salome, the family's Black servant.
World
A farm near Pretoria, from the 1980s to the 2010s.
What makes it different
It is structured around four funerals across forty years.
Feel
Wry and elegiac.
Page count and cover shown for: Selected edition
Further reading
- The PromiseWikipedia