The winner of the Booker Prize in 2021, this novel was a fascinating and quite wonderful reading experience.

The story takes place on a farm outside Pretoria, South Africa in the years before and just after the end of apartheid, and tells the story of the Swart family living through critical changes in their own lives and in that of their native country.

The book opens with Amor, the youngest of the three Swart children, being fetched from her boarding school by her aunt because her mother, Rachel, has just died.  Over the ensuing pages, we learn that Rachel had returned to her Jewish religion shortly before dying, a development that her husband and his family finds unsavory at best.  The four sections of the book are each entitled with the name of a Swart who dies before that section ends—Ma, Pa, Astrid, and Ashton— leaving Amor as the sole survivor along with Salome, the Black servant who has cleaned, cooked, and cared for the Swarts for decades.

Galgut’s writing is beautiful, and his narrative style is unusual and occasionally confusing or jarring, though in a way that propels the story forward..  The narration switches unexpectedly from third to first person and back again and at several points, the narrator steps back and even addresses the reader directly or admits to confusion about what is happening.  All of that works and serves to remind the reader that this is a novel, a facsimile of real life.  The language in support of the plot, place, and characters is what makes this book a jewel as Galgut takes the reader through the important questions of life, including primarily:  What is family for?  Amor, the major character, is described as follows in a paragraph about her reaction when she learns of her father’s death: “It’s the first time that Amor has thought about the farm in a while. She has learned, or perhaps always known, that if you want to move forward it’s best not to look back.  All she’s done since leaving South Africa is to keep moving forward, or at least keep moving, not always sure of the direction, changing rooms and cities and countries and people, all of it smearing past like a landscape at speed, something in me unable to stop.”  Note the subtle shift in this one paragraph from a third person to a first person narrator.  Strange, but it works.  Amor is one of the more fascinating characters I’ve encountered in recent fiction, a woman who was struck by lightning as a young girl—-a literal as well as a figurative shock—-and whose life has been altered forever by the event.

It’s difficult to tell you more about the book without ruining the experience of learning the fates of the Swarts and of South Africa.  Suffice it to say that the title, ‘The Promise’ has at least two meanings.  One of them is the promise of a new nation and young lives as Amor, Astrid, and Ashton start out in school and the army with their whole lives in front of them. The other meaning, is the promise that Pa gives Ma to give Salome the land and house that she’s lived on while serving the family.  These two promises interweave and clash throughout the novel with powerful effects.

Top  notch novel!