The story starts in 1986 with a promise made by a white South African family to their black housekeeper — and follows the fallout of this moment across 40 years.

The 57-year-old, who has been shortlisted twice previously, won the 50,000-pound prize against a shortlist that included Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers (Bewilderment; The Overstory), and which was notably young — with four of the six authors 40 years old or younger.

Chair of the judging panel Maya Jasanoff described The Promise as "A book that is a real master of form, and pushes the form in new ways, that has an incredible originality and fluidity of voice — and a book that's really dense with historical and metaphorical significance".

Galgut, who was shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2003 for The Good Doctor and again in 2010 for In a Strange Room has previously talked about the feeling of the spotlight falling off you abruptly when you don't win. 

Accepting the Prize in a live-streamed ceremony from London, the author said: "It's taken a long while to get here, and now that I have I kind of feel that I shouldn't be here. This could just as easily have gone to any of the other amazing, talented people on this list — and a few others who aren't."

"This has been a great year for African writing. And I'd like to accept this on behalf of all the stories told and untold, the writers heard and unheard, from the remarkable continent that I'm part of. Please keep listening to us."

Four funerals and a promise:

The promise of Galgut's novel is extracted by Rachel Swart from her Afrikaner husband as she lies dying, to give the broken-down house on their property to their housekeeper, Salome — who has cared for her in her final illness.

Or at least, that's how Rachel's daughter, Amor, recalls it — because the book never makes it clear whether her father makes the promise.

The book is structured around four funerals over four decades, as the Swart family dwindles, and as the effect of 'The promise' — and the lack of its fulfillment — is felt.

Speaking to Sarah L'Estrange from RN's The Book Show, Galgut said that the novel's structure came from "A sort of semi drunken afternoon" with a friend "Who happens to be the last surviving member of his family and is a very funny raconteur".

"He told me some of the stories of what had happened at the four family funerals that he'd attended of his parents and his brother and his sister.

"He made a lot of those stories very funny because, of course, funerals are occasions where families come together to honour somebody who's died, but what you're seeing and what you're encountering, are the living — and, you know, living people, especially families who want things but can't say that, are often very amusing."

Inevitably, however, the book's terrain is political and social, as it tracks changes in South Africa across 40 years — the 40 years of Galgut's adult life, and which he describes as "the most vivid and memorable to me".

"The characters living through those years embody different aspects of me and how I responded to politics and change in South Africa."

Many voices populate the book.

"This is a very fragmented and divided country that I live in, and there's no one voice that can speak for South Africa," Galgut told The Book Show.

"So it was satisfying in a certain way to be able to call up a chorus of voices, each one putting his point of view, sometimes overlapping each other, contradicting each other — even in the course of a single sentence."

Notably absent, however, is the voice and perspective of Salome, the housekeeper to whom the promise is made.

Speaking at the prize ceremony, Galgut said that this was deliberate.

"The point to be made really is that a woman like Salome — a rural, uneducated black woman — is somebody, even in the new South Africa, who still has no voice. And I wanted that to register as almost a physical fact."

Story By | Dee Jefferson