Chatto & Windus The Promise: WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 by Damon Galgut

The Promise by Damon Galgut charts the decline of the Swarts, a white South African family living on a farm outside Pretoria. The family reunites for Ma’s funeral, where long-held tensions surface and questions linger about what the Swarts represent and what they have failed to do.

As the younger generation, Anton and Amor, turn away from the family’s values, a long-standing commitment remains at the centre of the story: a promise made to Salome, the Black woman who has worked for the Swarts throughout her life. She was promised a house and land, yet the pledge is repeatedly left unresolved as the decades pass. The narration shifts between characters and into their dreams, keeping the weight of the unkept promise in view against a South Africa moving from entrenched divisions towards a “fairer” society.

Key details

• Author: Damon Galgut
• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Winner of the Booker Prize 2021

Synopsis

On a farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts gather for Ma’s funeral and old fractures re-emerge. Anton and Amor reject the family’s beliefs, while a promise made to Salome, their long-serving worker, remains unfulfilled across decades. Moving between viewpoints and dreams, the narrative follows a family’s diminishment alongside a changing South Africa, where the meaning of the lost promise reaches beyond one household.

Rackhams Reference : FMUSM9CF2V