A short story collection revolving around family relationships.
June 2010 Guest Editor Patrick Gale on Damon Galgut...
Cape Towner Galgut has won plaudits, especially from envious peers, for his extraordinary concision. His process in producing his novels seems to be all about stripping back and cutting out. Small surprise, then, that this collection published in his early twenties already bore the authentic stamp of his minimalist genius. The title novella draws on his own experience to show how a boy’s dangerous illness opens fissures in his household.
The first collection of extraordinary stories from one of the greatest writers of our time.
With astonishing clarity, Booker Prize winner Galgut explores both the intimacies and violence of family life against the complex landscape of 1980s South Africa.
From a mother who experiences a devastating unmooring after her child falls gravely ill, to a son retracing his late father's brief yet passionate affair, the stories ripple out from one another, tenderly exposing those bonds we cannot escape.
PRAISE FOR DAMON GALGUT: 'Galgut seems to deliver effortlessly...there's nothing he can't do' Times 'Damon Galgut is very nearly without peer...an essential writer' Garth Greenwell 'Terrifically agile and consistently interesting...certainly up there with Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee' Guardian
Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria in 1963. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was seventeen. His other books include Small Circle of Beings, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, The Quarry and The Good Doctor. The Good Doctor was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Damon Galgut lives in Cape Town.
