Damon Galgut - Free Library Land Online - Animals

The Promise

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 09:35:35 +0200

A modern saga that could only have come from South Africa, written in gorgeous prose by the Booker Prize-shortlisted author Damon Galgut.

Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life's unfulfilled promises; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.

Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the atmosphere of its country — an atmosphere of resentment, renewal, and—ultimately—hope. The Promise is an epic drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of national history, sure to please current fans and attract many new ones.

"Galgut will be seen as one of the great literary triumphs of South Africa's transition [ . . . ]...

Arctic Summer

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 08:09:23 +0200

Damon Galgut's third novel, a fictionalized biography of English author E.M. Forster, focuses on Forster's many years in India and the process of writing his masterpiece, A Passage to India. This compact, finely wrought novel also addresses Forster's unforgiving childhood in England and the homosexuality he feared and repressed throughout his life. Psychologically acute without being sentimental, Forster's relationships are described with compassion and great care. Galgut is a master at constructing strange, compelling landscapes, and Arctic Summer shifts seamlessly between staid, restricting England and Cairo and vibrant, pleasantly, absurd India. Moments of gentle humor shine through the sparse prose, lending Forster a humanity that makes his story all the more heartbreaking.

Beautiful Screaming of Pigs

Thu, 13 Nov 1997 08:09:23 +0200

A year ago Patrick Winter was in Namibia completing his military service. Now, during the its first free elections, Patrick has returned to the country he defended; the place where he fell in love for the first and only time. With the country poised to change forever, Patrick is forced to revisit his past and scale the wall that he has built around his painful memories of love and war, and loss.

In A Strange Room: Three Journeys

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 13:17:14 +0200

The Good Doctor

Fri, 13 Nov 1998 13:17:13 +0200

WINNER OF THE COMMONWEALTH WRITERS' PRIZE & Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

A powerful, taut and intense tale of a friendship overshadowed by betrayal, set against the tawdry hopes and disappointments of a post-apartheid South Africa.

When Laurence Waters arrives at his new post at a deserted rural hospital, staff physician Frank Eloff is instantly suspicious. Laurence is everything Frank is not-young, optimistic, and full of big ideas. The whole town is beset with new arrivals and the return of old faces. Frank reestablishes a liaison with a woman, one that will have unexpected consequences. A self-made dictator from apartheid days is rumored to be active in cross-border smuggling, and a group of soldiers has moved in to track him, led by a man from Frank's own dark past. Laurence sees only possibilities-but in a world where the past is demanding restitution from the present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last.

The Quarry

Sat, 13 Nov 2004 13:17:13 +0200

'I liked this novel a lot. It has all the vigour and raw honesty of The Good Doctor.' Doris Lessing On a lonely stretch of road a nameless man commits a murder. The victim is a religious minister on his way to take up a post in a nearby town. The murderer decides to steal the dead man's identity only to discover that one of his first duties as the new minister is to bury a body that has just been found out near the quarry... Captain Mong, the head of the local police takes a close interest in the minister's work, although there is evidence linking young petty criminals to the crime. Mong knows it is the new minister who is guilty. But he bides his time, watching, listening, slowly circling his prey. Building to a climax that is almost too much to bear with the town's church ablaze, the Captain is compelled to pursue the murderer across the veldt, while his exhausted quarry struggles to make good his escape. In The Quarry, Galgut's tender prose combines with the power of myth to creat...

In a Strange Room

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 13:17:14 +0200

A young man takes three journeys, through Greece, India and Africa. He travels with little purpose, letting the chance encounters of the road dictate his path. But although he knows that he is drifting, he is unable to settle. It is as if, without these encounters, the person he is cannot exist. And yet each journey ends in disaster. A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, In a Strange Room is an extraordinary evocation of one man's search for love, and a place to call home.