Damon Galgut

Trying to make sense of his native South Africa has never been easy for Damon Galgut, said Martin Chilton in The Independent (U.K.). The newest winner of the Booker Prize was at university in the mid-1980s, and he remembers telling his grandfather, a judge, about being beaten by police at an anti-apartheid protest and seeing others stripped naked. “Nonsense,” was the older man’s response, which told Galgut that white South Africans could no longer even see what was right in front of them. “It felt a bit like that— people insisting that reality was the other way around,” he says. The Promise, Galgut’s Booker-winning novel, returns to that era to open with a family funeral, mixing darkness and humor as it touches down at four funerals in all to bring its portrait of the family and nation up through today.

Galgut also mixed multiple points of view in The Promise, believing that his country’s story couldn’t be told any other way, said Jill Lawless in the Associated Press. “The notion that any one single voice can speak for South Africa is false,” he says. “We’re a chorus—a very dissonant, discordant chorus, but we are a chorus.” A Booker finalist twice before, Galgut claims that this novel came together easily once he hit on that insight. “No other writing experience,” he says, “has given me this kind of deep pleasure.” But that doesn’t mean he has delivered an upbeat state-of-the-nation report. South Africa, he says, hasn’t yet moved past the wounds of apartheid and is plagued by corruption and violence. “South Africans are very given to the hope that we can change things,” he says. “But that hope is in short supply right now.”