Winner of the Booker Prize 2021. A family in crisis: With its acute sense of the fault lines in family relationships and the sharply depicted interior lives of all the protagonists, Damon captures all the drama and pain that can be at the heart of our closest bonds. ‘The Promise is a gorgeous and pleasurable novel, with an imaginative heft to match Galgut’s fellow South African writers Gordimer, Coetzee and Brink. It's richly evocative of the land and its people, and reports on a new South Africa without fake moralising; it made me laugh, too. Dreamlike yet so solidly well-made, The Promise has lived on inside my head, unsettling and troubling me.’ Tessa Hadley.