The Promise by Damon Galgut

This was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2021, which is how I came to read it--as is almost always the case, no matter how many of the long listed books I read before the final winner is announced, and this past year it was 11 of the total 13, I have almost never ever read the winner pre-announcement. This book is exceptionally well written, so subtle and sly and occasionally magical that it makes the unpalatable truths about post-colonial South Africa easier to examine. The material and in some ways the approach to writing remind me of J.M. Coetzee's work in general and Disgrace in particular. The book chronicles the unraveling of apartheid as seen through the eyes of a bigoted white family. the decline of a white family during South Africa’s transition out of apartheid. It begins in 1986, with the death of Rachel, a 40-year-old Jewish mother of three on a smallholding outside Pretoria. The promise of the title is that her Afrikaner husband, Manie, would give their black maid, Salome, the deeds to the house she occupied and the youngest daughter Amor heard it. Now that Rachel is dead, Manie has apparently forgotten and doesn’t care to be reminded. The anger and tension between black South Africans and white colonizers pulses through the story and is all to relevant today.