![]() ![]() Four sections, set at roughly 10-year intervals, from Botha to Zuma via the 1995 Rugby World Cup and Mbeki’s inauguration, are each named after a family member who will die even once you’ve twigged the significance of the section titles, Galgut steals the breath with his willingness to fell his characters so randomly. ![]() ![]() Manie’s failure to keep his word falls like a curse as we follow his children down the decades. ![]() Nor does his bigoted family, who regard Amor’s stubborn insistence that Salome should own her home as the kind of talk that “now appears to have infected the whole country”. Now that Rachel is dead, Manie has apparently forgotten and doesn’t care to be reminded. The drama of the novel turns on a promise that her Afrikaner husband, Manie, made to her before she died, overheard by their youngest daughter, Amor: that Manie would give their black maid, Salome, the deeds to the annexe she occupies. It begins in 1986, with the death of Rachel, a 40-year-old Jewish mother of three on a smallholding outside Pretoria. D amon Galgut’s stunning new novel charts the decline of a white family during South Africa’s transition out of apartheid. ![]()
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