The Promise

A novel set in South Africa, spanning over multiple decades from pre-apartheid to present. We follow the five individuals of the Swart family, and the family's ultimate decline. It was quite hard to get into: took me a proper 150 pages before I "got" the rhythm. Galgut isn't marking out the conversations with interpunctions, like 98% of other works do. In a middle of a paragraph, the plot could jump to another setting or person. This was super annoying at first, and I got tired after having to re-read a long sentence to simply follow along. But, surprise surprise, I got used to the flowing prose and started to appreciate its high pacing. The characters are all described very masterfully. From the main to minor ones, they are very vivid. Also nuanced and believable: Galgut throws in tiny details as subordinate clauses in a sentence to flesh the characters out, instead of going full on info dump. Suddenly, there's a single thought or action which reveals a whole personality trait, and…