![]() ![]() Particularly striking is the third-person narration, which “addresses an implied Afrikaner reader”, and adopts a satirical, almost flippant tone as it “darts between characters, mid-paragraph or even mid-sentence”. It’s a “stunning” book, agreed Anthony Cummins in The Guardian: Galgut has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and may go “one better this year”. This is “obviously one of the best novels of the year”. Although The Promise is just 304 pages, Galgut packs so much in that you feel “there must be secret trapdoors involved”. Over the decades, the pledge goes unhonoured, and it comes to seem like a curse: in each of the novel’s four sections, set at intervals of roughly a decade, a family member meets an untimely death. Manie, the family patriarch, has made a promise to give Salome, the Swarts’ long-serving black maid, the deeds to the modest property she lives in. Book review: Real Estate by Deborah LevyĪ multi-generational saga set between 19, it tells the story of a well-off Afrikaner family, the Swarts, who live on a farm near Pretoria. ![]() Book of the week: The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White. ![]()
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