Book Club

This month we will be reading

The Promise by Damon Galgut

The Promise tells the story of a family and a nation under apartheid. 

“There is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Swart family, oh no, they resemble the family from the next farm and the one beyond that, just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans, and if you don’t believe it then listen to us speak...

The many voices of The Promise tell a story in four snapshots, each one centered on a family funeral, each one happening in a different decade. In the background, a different president is in power, and a different spirit hangs over the country, while in the foreground the family fights over what they call their farm, on a worthless piece of land outside Pretoria.

Over large jumps in time, people get older, faces and laws and lives all change, while a brother and sister circle around a promise made long ago, and never kept ...” (Penguin Random House)

This novel is the 2021 Booker Prize Winner. The Booker judges describe it as “a strong, unambiguous commentary on the history of South Africa and of humanity itself that can best be summed up in the question: does true justice exist in this world?”

Fiction, 272 pages

We hope you can join us for a discussion of this award-winning novel.

Future Book Club Reads (for more information see the calendar entry):

June 15: The Magician by Colm Tóibín

August 17: Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Wood. Note: we recommend this 1994 translation, which is considered closer to the original than the 1924 translation by Helen T. Lowe-Porter.