Damon Galgut has won the Booker prize for his portrait of a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid.
The promise of the title is one the Swarts make – and fail to keep over the years – to give a home and land to the black woman who worked for them her whole life.
It combines an extraordinary story with rich themes – the history of the last 40 years in South Africa – in an incredibly well-wrought package,” said the chair of the Booker judges, historian Maya Jasanoff.
But what makes them ‘representative’ isn’t their characters, it’s the times they’re living through,” he said in an interview for the Booker prize.
I don’t think I would have wanted to spend four years writing a book that was pulling me down.
The Promise’s structure is formally inventive, with the narration shifting between perspectives; the Booker judges called it an “unusual narrative style a testament to the flourishing of the novel in the 21st century”.
The idea to set the novel around four funerals came after a “semi-drunken afternoon, listening to a friend describe the funerals of his parents, brother and sister,” he told the Guardian.
Jasanoff said that Galgut’s “searching examination of family, place, and the dysfunctions that connect them” reminded the panel of Faulkner.
While the judges were unanimous in their decision to award the Booker to Galgut, Jasanoff said that they had “a lot of admiration” for the other five novels on the shortlist: debut American novelist Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, British-Somali author Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men, American Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, Sri Lankan Tamil novelist Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North, and American novelist Richard Powers’s Bewilderment.
Bea Carvalho, head of fiction at Waterstones, said: “We are thrilled that Damon Galgut has won this year’s Booker Prize.