“Home used to mean only one Thing, not a blizzard of things at war.” “How did it become so complicated?” Amor wonders at one point. Galgut’s multifarious writing style is bold and unusual, providing an initial barrier to entry yet achieving an intuitive logic over time. But the thought breaks off midway…”) to lyrical (“There’s a snory sound of bees, jacaranda blossoms pop absurdly underfoot”) to metafictional (“No need to dwell on how she washes away her tears”). The language is peppered with regional geography, terminology, and slang, with sentences ranging from clipped (“One day, she says aloud. Galgut moves fluidly among accounts of every single major and minor character, his prose unbroken by quotation marks or italics, as though narrated from the perspective of a ghost who briefly possesses every person. The promise is buried along with Rachel, only to be unearthed years later when subsequent family deaths force the Swarts to recollide for the rituals of mourning. Nobody else pays any mind: Amor is 13 years old at the start and functionally voiceless in her family. Only Amor, the youngest daughter, cares about her mother’s dying wish-that Salome, the Swarts’ domestic servant, receive full ownership of the house where she lives with her family, though under apartheid law, Black people are not legally allowed to own property in White areas.

Her husband, Manie, and three children, Anton, Astrid, and Amor, are all walloped by different incarnations of grief.

Three decades of South African sociopolitical history are woven into a saga of loss and missed opportunity that upends a dysfunctional Afrikaner family living outside Pretoria.

Synopsis of the promise galgut novel