There was a time many years ago when I was diligent about reading all the titles on the Booker Prize shortlist. I’ve grown out of that habit. Looking back over a list of the prize’s winners in the past fifteen or so years, I see I had read only one (Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo) before picking up the 2021 winner, The Promise. The novel was widely, and in some places wildly, praised when it appeared and again when it got the prize, so I was pleased when it showed up, neatly wrapped, under the Christmas tree.

It’s an ambitious novel, though not obviously so. The story itself is simple enough and follows from the mid-1980s to roughly the present day the declining fortunes of the Swarts, a white family who own a ramshackle farm not far from Pretoria. The novel opens with a gathering of the clan for the funeral of Ma and we’re quickly introduced to the grieving Pa (part owner of a reptile-themed amusement park), his three children, Amor, Astrid, and Anton, and some of the wider family. This is South Africa in the 1980s, so we also meet the black farm workers and servants. Among these is Salome, the old housemaid, to whom Ma had made a promise.

No spoilers here, so that’s enough about the plot. Suffice to say the Swart family sees plenty of death over the next 200 pages, and as for that fateful promise made to Salome you’ll have to read the book to find out what happens. I recommend you do. It may have its flaws (I didn’t like the intrusive, occasionally clumsy narrator), and it’s not “the most important book of the last ten years” (as it says on the cover), but it’s a powerful and affecting story through which the painful and hopeful recent history of South Africa is told. If you have read anything by some of the other greats of modern South African literature – Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, and André Brink, for example – you may feel, as I did after finishing The Promise, that Damon Galgut is an exciting newcomer to that great community of writers.