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.
Damon Galgut's first collection of stories transports us to 1980s South Africa where politics begins at home. The family - that small circle of beings where love should flourish - can be an arid and alienating territory where hatred and violence may ignite. The title novella is set in a house far out of town, at the end of a dust road that rises up into the mountains. The desperate bondage of family life is revealed to a mother as she sits at her son's bedside where he lies sick, perhaps dying. Galgut's understated prose unpicks the emotional paradoxes of family life with a surprising, surreal twist. In a world where some of the most intimate relationships are those between strangers, Small Circle of Beings describes how children must learn to pull away from their parents if they are to find their own way.
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.
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